Careers: Interviews
Novell CEO: Jack Messman
This week, Stephen Ibaraki, I.S.P.,
has an exclusive interview with Jack Messman,
Chairman, President and CEO of Novell.
Jack graduated from the University of Delaware with
a BSc in chemical engineering and received his MBA
with Distinction from the Harvard School of Business
Administration.
Prior executive roles include: President and Chief
Executive Officer of Cambridge Technology Partners
where he led its growth as an international
e-business services provider since 1999 (Messman
joined the Cambridge Board of Directors in 1992);
Chairman and CEO of Union Pacific Resources Group
Inc. (UPRG), a North American independent oil and
gas exploration and production company; Chairman and
Chief Executive Officer of U.S. Pollution Control,
Inc., Union Pacific's environmental services
company; Managing Director of Mason Best Company of
Houston, an investment banking firm; Chairman and
CEO of Somerset House Corporation, a publishing
company owned by Mason Best; Executive Vice
President-Chief Financial Officer and a member of
the Board of Directors for Warner Amex Cable
Communications, Inc.; Executive Vice President and
member of the Board of Directors of Safeguard
Scientifics, Inc.; President and CEO of Novell, Inc.
from 1982-1983; President and CEO of Norcross Inc.,
a consumer products company; and, prior to 1973, as
a partner in a Philadelphia investment banking firm.
Discussion:
Q: Your list of accomplishments and executive roles
are impressive indeed! We thank you for sharing your
years of experience and knowledge with us.
A: My pleasure. Happy to do it.
Q: Can you share your ideas about convergence in the
marketplace between services, products, and
solutions; and can you talk about Novell’s
acquisition of Cambridge Technology Partners in
2001, and the recent acquisition announcement of
SilverStream Software in June 2002?
A: Technology used to be bought by technologists.
Not anymore. The Internet has changed all this. Now,
key business processes are being put onto the
Internet. Revenue is driven by sales over the
Internet. Having the right technology in place has
become a critical business decision. So CEOs and
other executives are now heavily involved in
technology decision-making. And their focus is not
on bits and bytes, it’s on buying a solution to
address their particular challenges. Because of the
complexity of doing business across the Net, these
solutions increasingly require business services in
addition to technology. Services and products
together make solutions.
Novell has moved decisively toward providing
solutions to customers through our acquisitions of
Cambridge Technology Partners and SilverStream
Software. Cambridge brought to Novell a strong group
of consultants who understand not just the
technology, but how the technology is best leveraged
to address business challenges. With SilverStream,
Novell adds a dynamic development environment that
will allow us to help our customers build web
services solutions rapidly, leveraging our services
expertise and our traditional strengths in
infrastructure software. We understand the business
challenges; we have tools to help address those
challenges, and a framework for making it all work
smoothly, reliably, and securely. It’s a compelling
vision.
Q: What have been the challenges stemming from the
integration of Cambridge with Novell and what will
be the challenges in the future including the
acquisition of SilverStream?
A: Integrating Cambridge with Novell has presented
challenges on several levels, most of which we’ve
now overcome. First and foremost, as companies that
focused on different areas – CTP on services and
Novell on software – we’ve had to work to drive a
common culture around a single focus – solutions.
This has required adjustment on both sides. And
we’ve made significant progress there.
In a merger of this size, we also faced the usual
challenges of integrating systems and employee
programs. Fortunately, with Novell’s own
cross-platform focus and integration technologies,
we’ve been able to take care of these normal merger
challenges fairly easily.
Integrating SilverStream should be an easier
process. First, it’s a smaller operation, with less
than 500 employees versus the roughly 3,000 involved
in the Cambridge deal. In addition, since this is
primarily a technology deal and there is little to
no product overlap, we don’t expect to have to
address redundancy between the two firms. With
Novell and SilverStream both strong believers in
interoperability and multi-platform support, we
share a common vision – what we call “one Net” – a
world where networks work together, regardless of
what type of machine they’re running on. This shared
vision gives us a leg up on integration.
Q: Where do you see Novell today, in two years, and
in five years?
A: The next few years will see the build out of web
services from a niche to a mass market. With the
SilverStream deal, Novell offers a unique
triple-play – business consulting expertise with CTP,
a web services development framework with
SilverStream, and the most reliable, scalable, and
secure network infrastructure on the market to
manage a web services environment. So I see Novell
as one of the top five players in web services over
the next two years, a position we’d hope to solidify
or improve on in the five-year time frame.
Q: A few years ago I did a random poll of people to
see if they knew about Novell. About one in hundred
had heard of the company but their brand image of
Novell was all about a logo they saw when they first
started their computers. Novell still had
significant market share at that time, down from a
high of 69% to about 25%. However there was a shift
amongst companies where IT decisions were being made
by the business managers looking at the business
case for making IT purchases; and this was a change
from the hard core technical types in years past
that made these decisions. Novell always was a
technology leader but their “stealth marketing to
business types” presented challenges to their long
term health. Do you feel this is an accurate
assessment, and how are you strengthening and even
growing the Novell brand?
A: We know we face a tough perception in the market.
Technologists continue to know us well and give us
high marks for what we build. But the executive
level doesn’t know Novell, or knows us for the wrong
reasons. We are absolutely committed to changing
this. I don’t mean necessarily spending hundreds of
millions of dollars on advertising. We have to
market intelligently. We need to reach the executive
audience, the non-technical audience. And we’ll do
that by focusing on solutions to problems they
understand – like securing their corporate data,
improving information flow to employees, managing
networks more cost effectively. And helping them
develop new web services applications that lower
cost and drive new revenue opportunities. In short,
we’re going to start speaking business language to
business people. The Novell brand is a strong brand
– we need to re-energize it, and we’re working on
that.
Q: How will you be evolving Novell’s various channel
strategies in the near term and long term?
A: I’ve said on many occasions that Novell built its
historical success on the back of the channel. I
firmly believe we need to build our renaissance on
the channel, as well. We’ve developed our Clear
Channel Initiative to help clarify what we admit was
a confusing message over the last few years. We’re
establishing a named-account/named-partner model
that will make clear how we work with partners to
best reach the market. We’re providing strong
incentives to not only keep our channel happy and
selling, but to win back channel partners who’ve
left Novell over the last few years.
The acquisition of SilverStream will be a boost to
these efforts. As a leading platform for developing
web services, SilverStream’s eXtend products are a
great addition to the suite of technologies our
channel partners can take to market. Like it does
for Novell as a company, the deal also provides for
a more compelling offering for our solution provider
partners. They can now deliver not only networking
infrastructure, but a powerful web services
application development capability that helps their
customers leverage this infrastructure to build and
deploy applications cost effectively.
Q: What do you see as Novell’s core products and
services in 2003 and again in 2006?
A: One of the things we’ve said we need to do is
reduce the number of stand-alone Novell products.
The trend is to consolidate technologies into
bundles that make sense for businesses, for example
our Novell Secure Access suite. We’ll continue to
try to leverage our industry-leading eDirectory
technology into emerging areas like access and
security, provisioning, and network management.
We’ll continue to expand and enhance NetWare as a
platform for running web services. We’ll be taking
full advantage of the strong SilverStream developer
and apps server technologies to add new
functionality to the traditional Novell
technologies, and vice versa, bringing the strength
of Novell technology into the SilverStream products.
I can’t tell you what the names of these products
might be, or how they’ll be bundled. But that’s the
focus.
Q: What in your view are the five dominant
challenges facing enterprises in 2003 and again in
2006?
A: In 2003, it’s enterprise application integration,
but across the Internet. Companies have spent a lot
of money on technology, but aren’t seeing the return
because of complexity, systems that don’t
communicate, silos of information in different
places across the enterprise. We know from customers
getting their systems to work together really is the
focus now. Web services will begin in 2003 to really
make inroads in this area. Web services will be an
“inside-out” play, starting as a way for companies
to make the systems communicate internally. Beyond
that, I see identity management and access, privacy
protection, empowering a mobile workforce, and
building customer relationships across the web as
key challenges.
By 2006, web services will be the common ground.
Internally, companies will link together different
platforms, different applications, leveraging common
data to work effectively across the corporation. But
web services will also be the key way to work
outside the enterprise, with partners, customers,
and suppliers, based on open standards, using
re-usable application logic that allows applications
to be created “on the fly,” across the Internet. By
2006, Novell’s one Net vision should be largely
reality, thanks to web service advances. Key
challenges will continue to be securing this one Net
environment, and customizing relationships with
partners, suppliers, and customers.
Q: IT decisions can have a significant impact on any
company large or small. If you were holding a
briefing to CEOs of mid-sized corporations, what
would be your advice to them? What would be your
advice to large corporations and to small companies?
A: First, IT isn’t a miracle cure. Companies need to
have solid business plans and best-of-breed business
processes. Technology can help makes these work
better, but the best technology won’t fix a mistaken
business plan. Second, look to IT as a cost-saver,
not as an expense. Right now, executives are gun shy
about IT spending. Many overbought in the dot.com
euphoria and are now sitting with shelfware they
can’t use. But it’s a mistake to conclude from this
that IT spending is money down the drain. In fact,
IT still remains one of the best ways to earn a
return on investment.
I’d also tell executives to find ways to leverage
what you have – don’t run out and buy the latest
simply because a vendor puts out an upgrade to a
product. Large companies can save significant
amounts of money using IT to automate costly
processes. With web services, we’ll be able to build
applications that automate processes between
companies, and between buyers and sellers, much more
than we can today. Smaller companies have perhaps an
even greater incentive to continue to invest in IT –
they can reach and maintain relationships with more
customers using the Internet than they possibly
could otherwise. The dot.com boom and bust is
history. Companies must now look at technology as
they would any capital expenditure – do the
cost/benefit analysis, look for the payback. It’s
there.
Q: You have held many senior executive positions
over a remarkable career. Can you share two or more
stories from these times? What “lessons-learned”
could you share with the audience?
A: Yes, it’s been quite a ride, and all very
exciting. Not really sure about stories to tell, but
I definitely have learned lessons. I think one of
the most important I’ve learned involves corporate
culture. If you get the culture right, if you get
everyone pulling in the same direction, it makes all
the difference. When I first went into the oil
business at Union Pacific Resources, I was surprised
to find that it really was populated by a bunch of
JR Ewing types. Customer service wasn’t a driving
force for many of the firms in the drilling
business. We made a conscious decision to change the
face we presented to our customers. We became the
“friendly” oil company to deal with. And this led to
more business and higher revenues.
Q: If you were doing this interview, what four
questions would you ask of someone in your position
and what would be your answers?
A: First, why do you do what you do? Answer –
Because it’s interesting, intellectually rewarding,
and because technology, despite the dot.com
collapse, really is changing the nature of not just
business, but also how we communicate and live our
lives. It’s a fascinating place to be at a
fascinating time.
Two, can Novell regain its former leadership role in
the tech industry? Answer – Yes. Novell has
unquestionably been through a rough period. It has
lost the luster it enjoyed in the early 1990s as the
clear leader in enterprise networks. But there’s an
interesting thing happening now: the market is
coming back to us. Web services are a hot marketing
buzzword right now, but any serious assessment of
this market shows it’s really just getting started.
With the combination of SilverStream’s web services
development framework and Novell’s core networking
skills, which are needed to deliver those services
securely and reliably across any platform, we become
a legitimate top five player in the web services
space. The legions of dedicated Novell customers –
the large installed base – give us a great
foundation on which to expand.
Three, where’s your industry headed? Answer – Web
services is the next computing shift, replacing
client-server technology. The days of the fat
computer sitting on a desktop with a bunch of
applications is ending. Now, people want to access
information and tools from the network – the
Internet – wherever they are, on their cell phones,
on their PDAs, at the airport. It’s a paradigm
change, in the true sense of the word. Novell is
right in the middle of this - web services deliver
applications over the network, and nobody knows
networks like Novell.
Four, an issue of great topicality these days, what
does corporate America need to do to restore its
image? Answer – Go back to basics. I attribute lot
of the bad news coming out of corporate America as
losing focus on the basics. People began to believe
the dot.com hype. They saw a market that just kept
going up, corporate valuations for firms like Yahoo,
Amazon and eBay that were just out of this world. I
think this led to a loss of rigor in evaluating what
made sense from a business perspective and what
didn’t. And it led to unrealistic expectations with
regard to returns and rewards. When these
expectations weren’t met, companies were caught in
untenable situations. I think we’ve already begun to
see a return to the basics. Executives and boards
are looking at the business rationale for every
move, they’re returning to building long-term
shareholder value as their objective – an objective
they never should have abandoned.
Q: Thank you for sharing your valuable insights with
us today. We all watch with interest as you weave a
tapestry of change, shaping Novell into a better
future.
A: Thank you for the opportunity. |
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