Enterprise systems and services vendor Novell has launched a new strategy and series of products – all under the umbrella term Intelligent Workload Management (IWM). The combined system manages virtualisation and cloud computing and is currently being rolled out to customers.

Computing talked to Novell president and chief executive Ron Hovsepian about the vendor's ambitions for the future.

Computing: How is Novell faring following a difficult decade?

Hovsepian: I think we've done a great job of cleaning ourselves up financially and technically, and we are in much better shape than we’ve been in for eight to 10 years.

We began looking at the next move for the company in terms of the evolution of the market about 18 months ago – it was important for us to look at how our assets fitted with changes in the market.

What was the reason for the focus on IWM?

Obviously getting involved in virtualisation was important. Gartner has said that although only 16 per cent of computing activity is virtualised today, this will grow to about 50 per cent by 2012.

And although only one per cent of this activity is hosted in the cloud today, cloud services are expected to experience a compound annual growth rate of 30 per cent for the next five years, according to IDC.

There were two big motivations for looking at virtualisation and cloud, these were minimising my costs as a CIO, and maximising my application and business flexibility.

So will there be different types of cloud computing?

Put simply, there are going to be two major markets for cloud computing. First is one in which an application has already been written and the customer wants that to be hosted and managed in the cloud.

The other is where brand new applications are being written or built for the cloud. This is the market that Google Apps and Microsoft's Windows Azure will target.

They want businesses to deliver applications into their platforms, and they will deliver the rest of the stack. Basically, they want to control the whole stack, just like they do in the enterprise today.

The first market is where the bulk of applications currently sit.

We developed our Suse appliance tool for application vendors targeting the second market. This product allows them to create a virtual appliance. They won’t have to rewrite and retest the application once it is in a cloud and it allows firms to host their application on other clouds too.

Will the concerns that large enterprises have about data security and outages disappear as cloud computing technology matures?

Over time they will. They're certainly reluctant to move their data and applications between clouds because of these security concerns.

Who’ll be in charge of implementing cloud in the business?

I think further adoption of the technology will happen in two ways. Some of the business heads in those large companies will go out and buy cloud applications without telling their IT folks.

They’ll say to the CIO, 'Hey, I know you're in charge of technology, but I already bought this app – make it work'. We've created tools to allow the CIO to manage that. Where it's an internal cloud, you still have to put the same management disciplines in place.

Second, CIOs will manage their IT environment outside their own four walls, and systems like our cloud security technology will allow them to begin to do this while meeting their protocol and compliance requirements.

Novell BSM with integrated compliance is an important technology in this respect.

We’re assuming that even in this internal cloud scenario, a company will have two or three hypervisors [systems that virtualise the technology] running, but you can't afford to have two or three sets of tools and consoles to manage that.

So, there needs to be better workload management to manage the relationship between these hypervisors, as well as between the internal and external clouds [such as Google].

How does the interoperability agreement with Microsoft relate to the IWM launches? [The Microsoft/Novell Partnership announced in 2006 gives interoperability and virtualisation solutions for firms using both Windows and Linux]

The agreement means that Microsoft can run their virtualised applications on our environment and we can run ours on theirs.

I think it works really well. Our core assumption is that customers are Microsoft customers and have multiple Java technology stacks. So in a virtualised environment, this relationship allows us to support and optimise those workloads.

This puts us in a stronger position than competitors such as Red Hat, for example.

So our strategy is built on that assumption of heterogeneity. Where firms have multiple technology stacks, we can optimise and build security and governance into them.