Graham Titterington

 Sentinel 5 monitors multiple sources and reports them, with appropriate reactions, to a central control point. Novell is now a leading open-source vendor and has chosen identity management as one of its core areas of expertise. It is presenting the e-Security acquisition as being complementary to its identity management capabilities in delivering compliance strategies for enterprises.

Comment:

e-Security should perform much better within the Novell family. Its ludicrously all-embracing name, which gave no clue as to what it really did, only served to emphasise the narrow focus of its activities and its limited resources. Additionally, enterprise security management is one of those disciplines that is only now becoming widely recognised as a valuable part of the IT infrastructure. It would however be better for Novell to drop the emphasis on "compliance". The value of this technology is in protecting the enterprise and its assets and reputation. You would be hard pressed to find any mention of distributed denial of service attacks in the body of compliance legislation!

Novell needs to be careful about maintaining its focus on its chosen specialisations. It is still in the process of a painful move from being a vendor of a wide variety of infrastructure offerings into one that is more tightly focussed on specific areas of identity management and operating systems. e-Security adds a second leg to its security offering. It now has a relatively strong offering in two security niches, but the synergy between the two is limited and it is certainly not a comprehensive security vendor. As we have said before, Novell is attempting to paper over the cracks between the two pieces with a story about compliance which doesn't stand up to examination. Novell will need a lot of skill to exploit any potential synergies. The openness of e-Security may work well with Novell's open systems stance, but many enterprise security management platforms are open at least on the reporting front. Openness in reacting to threats is a much more scarce and valuable commodity. Novell would do well to work on this aspect.