Novell Inc. Monday announced new solutions, all closely tied in with new subsidiary Cambridge Technology Partners (CTP), but insisted it has not cut other systems integrators out of the loop.
The first of Novell’s Jump Start solutions is Employee Provisioning, a system for maintaining user identity profiles and access privileges between PeopleSoft HR and other applications, said senior vice president of solutions Marty Deise during a conference call. The solution will be deployed through Novell’s services arm CTP, which was acquired by the Provo, Utah-based company earlier this year.
Employee Provisioning is the first joint effort from Novell and CTP and “provides a great opportunity to begin to get to know each other within the organizations,” said Dave Lawrence, vice-president of enterprise resource management for Novell. CTP will lab test software configurations for clients based on their existing infrastructure and requirements, added Dave Horn, manager of solutions deployment.
Other services organizations and systems integrators like Deloitte & Touche and Cap Gemini Ernst & Young may be involved with Novell deployments. “Let me be very blunt and clear about this,” said Deise. “The delivery of this employee provisioning solution does not change Novell’s emphasis on the channel.”
For the immediate future, however, Employee Provisioning will be a CTP-only play. In the coming months, Novell will introduce three more Jump Start solutions: Rapid Technology Optimization, an analysis and cost reduction/recovery tool; Access and Security for remote access, portals, extranets and e-markets; and enterprise information portal for browser-based access to corporate information.
These offerings will be made available to integrators other than CTP, said Deise, but Novell is waiting to see what fits best with whom. “We will look at CSI partners as well as any other channel we can to drive these new solutions to marketplace,” he said. During Novell’s annual conference Brainshare, held last March in Salt Lake City, the company iterated that CTP would be courting enterprise-size companies and the so-called C-level (CEOs and CIOs). Small and medium-sized customers would be available to Novell’s channel partners. Prevailing thought during Monday’s conference call was that the likes of Deloitte & Touche are so much larger than CTP, they wouldn’t be adversely affected its close connection with Novell.
With CTP now under Novell’s wing, relationships with other software vendors are being considered, he added. Pricing for Employee Provisioning will be based on Novell’s existing price structure plus case by case integration estimates from CTP.
