Bob Flynn is the new President and General Manager for the Novell Business Unit. He posted a blog on July 28th outlining the ‘Next Chapter’ for Novell. See Blog here.

The day before this blog was posted, Bob and Jeff Hawn - Attachmate Group CEO - addressed the engineering team in a BBQ lunch meeting at the Provo campus. It was a call to action! In my opinion, Attachmate Executives have done an excellent job in just a few short weeks of streamlining the portfolio and focusing our efforts, resources, energy and future in all of the right directions – finally!! The simple statement: “Novell is hiring more R & D resources in Provo, UT and reinvesting in our core products with more frequent releases” is music to my ears. I have also heard from our customers and partners that this is an awesome and a welcomed message. Furthermore, this is immediately affecting the GroupWise engineering resources– positions have been posted, recruiting and re-recruiting has begun.

Not only is it important, from my perspective, to increase the investment in our core products, but it is equally important how the “focus and portfolio management” will allow us to be able to cleanly execute. We finally having a collaboration strategy that is business focused, customer driven, product and marketing managed and engineering aligned will make such a huge difference!

In addition, I have been asked to take on a new project where I will be spending my time executing one of our new taglines: create a direct line of sight from our customers directly to our engineering teams. Our customers have always been very loyal and now we need to help you be loyal. It will obviously take some time to satisfy each and every customer, but with the added investment and the renewed executive interest in wanting to make the Collaboration business a success, this will get done!

In addition, we still have a very dedicated and talented engineering team – the absolute best. I have full confidence they will deliver.

Now I don’t want to over promise or make anyone believe that ‘tomorrow’ we will provide solutions for everything. But our commitment is:

• Deliver higher-quality solutions and greater customer value faster

• Enable customers to upgrade to latest versions at their own pace

• Enable and secure a portable workspace across wired and mobile devices

• Consolidate and leverage social experience across our collaboration portfolio

Here is a list of categories (some are very big buckets, I know) where our customers expect solutions. Help us prioritize! Give me your top 3 out of this list and any specifics you want to include. Have we missed any? Are there any of these that you are not as interested in?

• 3rd-Party Integrations

• Mobility (RIM, ActiveSync)

• Quality

• Windows Client Features

• WebAccess Features (Tablet/Simple Templates, Web IM)

• Co-Existence (Exchange/GW)

• Currency (latest platforms, fresh look, latest architecture)

• Active Directory Support / Administration Model

• Unified Communications

• Security

• Instant Messaging/Conferencing

• Document Management

• Cloud / Hosted

• Mac

• Outlook

Of course, this list is very high level. In several of these areas there is currently a solution or a partial solution.

Well – It seems like I have said enough….Thoughts?

Dean