Novell Canada names familiar face as president

Novell (Nasdaq: NOVL) has made two key managerial moves to further enhance its new strategy of being a partner led organization.

Katie McAuliff has been promoted to vice president of channels, Novell Americas. McAuliff, who held the president of Novell Canada Ltd. position, will be replaced by the subsidiary’s chief technology offer Ross Chevalier, who has been with Novell Canada for 11 years, said his approach to the job will be a straight forward one.

He outlined three business goals, which align with the company and they are:

• Executing on actionable strategy;

• Workable vision that resonates with partners and customers; and

• Leveraging the talent at Novell and in its partner base along with customers and other industry communities.

These three business goals will go across Novell’s Linux and open source systems, resource management, identification services and workgroup collaboration offerings, he said.

As for McAuliff, Chevalier said her promotion to the Americas channel chief position was very fortuitous for Novell Canada.

“Katie has credibility in the channel space and she is taking over the entire Americas channel for us. She understands the Canadian market and what makes us special and unique,” he said.

McAuliff started the process for Novell Canada to become a partner-led organization and Chevalier said he will continue her work in this area.

The 25-year veteran of the IT industry in Canada said he was very fortunate to be selected to take on this role and he is grateful for the promotion.

“I spent 11-years at Novell and I was a Novell partner since the 1980s (Chevalier was an executive at Brains II). Novell is a big part of that and I am honoured to work with these people,” he said.

Chevalier remembers when he was a partner at Brains II and as president of Novell Canada he knows the vendor has to create revenue streams that have margins that make it worth the channel’s while.

At the past Brainshare event, Novell’s channel chief Pat Bernard outlined four new pillars for its channel business. They are: making partners profitable, investing in the growth of partners’ businesses, enabling partners with sales and tech support and creating a partner-centric company.

Chevalier wants to enable partners to prove that they are different.

“We’ll give them more money on the front end and the back end with the right rebates and promotions. We’ll say you have stepped up and invested in us and we’ll invest in you,” he said.

Chevalier also wants to get out of the channel’s way. “We are not going to be in the services delivery business. We want you to be successful because it’s the best for both of us and the customer gets a trusted advisor that knows the market place,” he said.

Also his new title will not prevent him from continuing to speak on the value proposition of open source. He said that Novell is committed to open source and to a mixed source environments. “What the mix is will vary, but I will proselytize the use of open source,” he said.

Chevalier has come up with three “O” for open source adoption. The first “O” is open standards, which will help to prevent vendor lock in. The second is open source for flexibility. The last “O” is open delivery so that customers are not bound to any specific entity.

“This is a different philosophy and these three ‘O’s’ create a powerful punch that is on the side of the customer.”

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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Paolo Del Nibletto
Paolo Del Nibletto
Former editor of Computer Dealer News, covering Canada's IT channel community.

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