David Thomas, ManageSoft's Asia Pacific director and David Lenz, sales and marketing director at Novell Asia-Pacific, go head to head on their respective offerings.
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THOMAS: Given the dominance of Microsoft's Active Directory in the marketplace, how will you manage the impact to Novell's NDS strategy?
LENZ: Firstly, let's assume you mean Novell eDirectory as the product -- Novell NDS was replaced some five years ago. Microsoft Active Directory has certainly helped customers who have struggled with the scalability and reliability of NT Domain.
It has also allowed them to move to a system that solves some of their issues and now has some limited capabilities across a WAN environment. Novell offers customers much more than just an application directory to manage Microsoft servers.
Customers wishing to manage across Windows, Unix, Linux, and NetWare realise the limitations of a single vendor solution. Novell's strategy is to offer customers choice and the phenomenal growth of Novell eDirectory since it replaced NDS in 1999.
Novell's approach has been clearly supported by our customers and the market as Novell continues to be the market leader in the directory space.
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LENZ: Given that your Head Office is now in the US it would be good to provide a history of your organisation going back to the Box Hill days.
THOMAS: ManageSoft was founded after the staff buyout of Hewlett-Packard's Research & Development labs in 1990. Twenty-five of the staff pooled their severance pays, bought the technology they'd been developing and started a company in Melbourne.
Since that time, the company has continued its fantastic success and expanded throughout Europe, UK, South America, and the USA.
While the Australian industry is the loser when organisations like HP's R&D labs close, the legacy they leave behind is far more valuable -- a team of people who think globally and who know how to build a world-class software company -- that's what we did.
THOMAS: The software industry is dominated by US companies that see Australia as a very distant market. Does Novell see the lack of a local R&D capability a hindrance in supporting Australian companies?
LENZ: Novell is a very well-structured organisation and the president for the Asia-Pacific region reports directly to the company's CEO and chairman. This provides the region and our Australian customers with direct access to the management of the company including R&D resources. We also have R&D facilities in the region in India and China. The Australian operations have contributed and will continue to contribute to the development of our product suites. For example, our Branch Office product came from research and development in Australia with Australian customers. We see our global approach to R&D as a significant advantage over our competition.
LENZ: The IT software market has its challenges and certainly go-to-market strategies play an important part of doing business in the Asia-Pacific market. What are ManageSoft channels to market in the region?
THOMAS: ManageSoft Corporation is a focused software management solutions provider. We do one thing and we do it better than anyone else -- software management.
To deliver value to our customers such as ANZ Bank, KPMG, and JC Penny, we have a broad-based approach:
- Our solutions are based on key technologies provided by our "technology partners" -- Microsoft and IBM.
- We maintain direct enterprise sales teams in our major markets, including Australia, USA, and Europe, providing a wealth of experience in the software management market.
- Finally, we compliment this capability with regional partners who have a deep understanding of their customer's business, providing the bridge between the technology and value delivery.
LENZ: Novell has a very extensive suite of support software for resource management solutions. This covers support for the desktop and server for Microsoft, Linux and NetWare. Novell chooses best-of-breed third-party solutions as required to complete our offerings based on customer feedback.
We have demonstrated agility by being able to provide these solutions to our extensive world wide customer base in a timely manner. As always a good indication of how popular Novell's offerings are is how well they're received by customers and market analysts.
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