Chicago-native Katie McAuliff has spent 13-years of her professional career at Novell and she says this is the most exciting time for her at the company.
The reason for her excitement isn’t so much at being named the first female president in Novell Canada’s history, but more because of the company’s position of strength in the marketplace.
Novell, with a newly-formed partnership with archrival Microsoft, has made major strides in the data centre space and on the desktop with Suse Linux.
With this new momentum, McAuliff has three goals for her division this year: increase the visibility of the brand, leverage its partner ecosystem and sharpen the subsidiary’s focus on the pushing open source to financial services and identity management for healthcare.
“We want to focus the right partner with the right solution for the right vertical (market) to meet the right business needs,” she said.
CDNNow sat down this week with McAuliff to discuss her new role at the company.
CDNNow: Why would you want this job or challenge?
Katie McAuliff: This to me presents an opportunity to continue to grow personally and to learn a bit about international business. The country of Canada has some unique differences based upon my prior experiences. So for me it is an opportunity to grow, learn and take on some new challenges and get some different things done for Novell.
CDNNow: Sometimes it’s hard to follow an individual who has put his stamp on the industry like Don Chapman did. Does that enter your mind?
KM: It doesn’t enter my mind. This is an opportunity to have some fun and create some momentum and successes for customers and partners. Certainly Novell Canada has a great name. Don and I have known each other for many years. We worked together many times at many events over the years. I have great respect for him. He would also agree with me that you have to move the company forward. That will be my charter going forward.
CDNNow: Do you have a new direction for Novell in Canada or will you just be executing on the current mandate?
KM: We have a little bit of a difference in focus. I would not call it a new direction. I would say there is an increased focused in the leveraged model, which are partners. We want to have all different kinds of partners into our ecosystem: VARs, SIs, distributors, software resellers, consultants, OEM, manufacturers. All those organizations have an opportunity know and learn what we do and speak on our behalf and represent us to the market. Most of the time our solutions work with theirs. So we can increase our leverage in the market and increase our visibility as an organization. We will be doing that in a few different ways. Again, it is about the focus and execution of these goals. I do not believe the direction we are taking is a completely different direction but we will have increased focus in different areas for 2007.
CDNNow: Don Chapman and the team worked for many years to make Novell a 100 per cent channel company. What you will your channel strategy be going forward?
KM: We will not succeed without an excellent channel working on our behalf. They are critical to us. I would say their importance to us and their relationship with us is only going to go up. We have done some great things this year to allow the channel itself to really make money and benefit from the relationship with Novell in a number of different program changes with PartnerNet 2007. We have increased their ability to make money and to be more profitable. It’s one of my three strategies for Canada in 2007. If we focus a Linux certified partner on a particular open source data centre opportunity with a customer, we need to support that. It is a recipe for success. And we will get better at this with the channel and I hope they see that. This is just the beginning.
CDNNow: What is your take on the Canadian channel?
KM: We have great channel partners in Canada. One of the things that I was immediately struck by is just the sheer number of organizations and the differences in them. For instance, there are a larger number of outsourcers in Canada. There is a lot of partnering that occurs between these customers, these outsourcers and Novell. That partnering and some of the things we can get done there are a unique opportunity for Novell Canada. The channel is evolving and we are also evolving so we better continue to evolve. I’d say where we would like to see progress in is in specialization. I think it is very difficult for the channel to be everything to every organization. The technology has gotten more complex. That is going to be tough proposition. So deciding to be the best at open source or deciding to be the best in security is a powerful decision that some of those organizations could make this year. It could benefit them greatly to do one or two things well.
CDNNow: One of the criticisms from channel partners here on subsidiary leadership – and let me preface this by saying this is not your fault – in having Americans run Canadian subsidiaries is a lack of commitment. What level of commitment can give your customers and the channel?
KM: I can tell you that Novell, as a corporation, has a great career development process. That is very important to us and as you would expect when working in different organizations with different teams in different markets at different levels perhaps even going form general management to product management those types of experiences build well-rounded senior executives. That is critical to us and is part of our career development philosophy. I will stay very connected to my old markets and my old customers in the mid-west. I believe the responsibility of any executive role is to provide continuity before and after they do any job or assignment and to less the impact on the transition. I am very committed to Novell Canada. I will be moving here to this country and Toronto. I am committed to the customers and the team. You will see that this year.
CDNNow: Does the SAAS model intrigue you and does it have a roler at Novell?
KM: It does play a role for us today. Software-as-a-Service is really about the flexibility of an architecture. You can componentize and break them up and apply them when you need them, especially in portals and in healthcare. Being able to call on different pieces based upon a specific need, I do think, is valuable. It is an architecture play and it integrates into our technology in different ways, but if I am a customer or consumer of technology it gives me the ability to be very flexible in taking what I got in my bag of IT tricks and applying it to my business.
CDNNow: One area the channel says the Novell is sorely lacking is in marketing. What are your plans in this area?
KM: From a marketing perspective, for us, honestly it is about momentum and word of mouth and markets and conversations and CxOs talking to other CxOs and channel partners talking to customers or each other. So from our perspective the most important thing we can do here is get the message out as clearly and as concisely as possible. The message I just shared with you and get that done many, many times over. I also believe that Calgary is a different market than Halifax and Halifax is a different market than Montreal, which is different than Toronto. I already see that from my travels across the country. Some markets are more progressive with technology adoption than others. Each market has its own word of mouth and network. So you will see us do some local things that will speak to each market individually.
CDNNow: What’s been the enterprises’ reaction to the Microsoft-Novell partnership?
KM: It’s been excellent. I’ve had several joint meetings, as had the team with Microsoft, in front of enterprise organizations. I have spoken and met with some of the Microsoft executives and we have other organizations targeted to speak to jointly and the response I would say has been overwhelmingly positive. At the end of the day the agreement is about customers. If you put anything else aside and question the people have and dig and delve into the many parts of it this benefits customers between two large organization with excellent solutions in the data centre. We will work together seamlessly. The enterprises reaction to that has been excellent. They do not want vendors to finger point. They are not interested in having confusion. You will also see from Novell Canada some organization that will be taking advantage of the partnership between Novell and Microsoft, which will be announced in March.
CDNNow: How long do you think it will take for Novell to spin off the ZenWorks business?
KM: As an organization there are five areas that we focus in: data centre solutions, security and identity, resource management, workgroup and Linux desktop. Resource management is one of the five areas. You can say we have four areas we focus in because desktop and data centre both have to do with Linux and open source. So the debate is between five and four. But, the bottom line is resource management is one of the pillars of our strategy. You will see, as I said, in March of this year some significant announcements in this space about data centre management. Being in the data centre space makes us just by nature of the technology solutions we provide there very strategic to many organizations. Providing data centre solutions is a little different in terms of uptime requirement than, say, who we were 10 years ago and what file and print might be perceived as, for instance. Data centre is very mission critical. Zenworks technology will play very heavily in this and you will see a number of announcements. We will be changing the architecture so Zen access management, patch management and some of the other technologies acquired will be able to be administered seamlessly and easily from an end-user perspective. The architecture will come together as a resource management solution from data centre to desktop to mobile devices. And, it will be powerful. If you look at the growth in this space it, I would not want to say ridiculous, but it would be interesting for us not to be in this space because this is a space that is seriously growing.
Comment: cdnedit@itbusiness.ca