Open Source Blog

Q. You were due to visit the UK this week, so you obviously had short notice in terms of the changes. Could you give us an idea of the timeline of events and how aware were of board level conversations before that?

A. First I'd like to take the opportunity to apologise to our customers in the UK for missing them, if you could pass that on.

Secondly, in terms of the timeline, the board just had their meeting on Wednesday at 3pm where they formally carried out the changes and elected me. What the board has spoken about before that, I was not privy to that as I was not a member of the board.

Q. They must have been pretty confident you would say 'yes' to the job though; otherwise it could have been an interesting position?

A. That could have been a real blooper moment.

Q. You've been quoted elsewhere today as saying "internally the team has been requesting the right leadership for a period of time". Could you expand on that?

A. I was answering a question about morale. We do measure our employee engagement [through surveys] and they have said they wanted a stronger set of management and decisiveness. It's a standard review of how management is judged and that will continue.

We've got 5,000 people here and I know I'm not the one who'll turn this around, I'm just one of 5,000.

Q. But you're the one who has to make the decisions. You also said yesterday there would be no stone unturned in order to look to create value. What are the priorities in terms of where to look first? What's the biggest stone?

A. It's not a matter of there being one big stone unfortunately, if it was that easy we'd already have done it. What we have to focus on is the strategy and our strategy is to make sure Linux is the centrepiece of what we get done for open source and what we get done for the company and shareholders.

[The company will also continue to focus on ID and access management businesses, according to Hovsepian, making the most of better than industry growth in those segments].

We need to make sure we deliver those to support Linux, and we also need to focus on simplifying things for our customers and employees. For example our renewals process is very intensive, in July we'll be delivering a new customer renewal centre to solve this problem with more self-service.

Q. So, as you just said, it's not going to be a matter of product strategy changes, but how you execute the strategy and get the products to customers.

A. That's right. I've also talked about non-organic growth, there's obviously some gaps and we will make acquisitions to fill in gaps on the management services side to support what we're doing with Linux.

Q. There were requests last year for changes from some analysts - Blum and CSFB - some of which Novell followed through with. One of the requests was that Novell invest higher up the open source stack. Is that an intention?

A. We actually had plans in place to do a number of the events they asked for, it's just the timeframes were out of step. I do see the opportunity to do things up the stack, but what I mean by that is management services, in terms of identity and access management, and resource management. I do not see us becoming an application level provider.

Q. At BrainShare we discussed the ongoing sales improvement efforts that you were driving through. Are there initiatives that you'll now be able to push forward that perhaps you couldn't before?

A. Yes. There are additional areas in the back office to help us become more simplistic, that I've talked about, but the leadership has been working together for the last six months on this and I feel we're in lock step.

In terms of executing that, there's one less box I have to check now. I can go a little faster.