In January, Chicago native Katie McAuliff, who has worked for Novell Inc. for 13 years, took over as president of Novell Canada, replacing Don Chapman. Ms McAuliff will oversee all facets of the Canadian organization including sales, marketing, consulting, support, training, finance and operations, with a focus on expanding and strengthening Novell Canada's partnership model.
She sat down with Jack Kapica of Globetechnology.com to explain her company and its plans.
JACK KAPICA: Novell has been shifting its image recently. What markets is the company focussing on?
KATIE McAULIFF: A lot of people don't really know who we are and what we do today. We're in five markets — data centre, desktop, security and identity management, resource management and workgroups. Novell is firmly behind all these markets.
The Linux desktop is a complete blast. This market just went to a million downloads. It's hot, it's cool, it's a lot less expensive, the kids are loving it. School systems have some great desktop operating systems — it's also in kiosks, retail systems, point-of-sale systems. A lot of those systems are being refreshed now, so the best thing now is really lowering the cost of ownership, increasing return on investment. This is a great space, very strong selling. We're 95 per cent there as a viable alternative to anything else.
These are huge growth markets for us, enjoying double-digit growth.
A lot of people don't even realize that Linux runs on a mainframe, and that we do a lot of business on mainframes with Linux partitions. My sense here is that the potential has not yet been realized in the Canadian market.
JACK KAPICA: When Novell bought SUSE Linux, I figured you'd do with it what IBM did with Linux — aim at the enterprise market, which is what Novell was all about before. Yet you've been making SUSE more appealing to ordinary users, with its eye candy its plug-and-play features. What is the strategy behind of appealing to both markets?
KATIE McAULIFF: Think about the enterprise applicability of an inexpensive desktop — think about how much money organizations spend on their desktop software and operating systems. If they could go from $3-million to $100,000 a year, what could they do with the $2.9-million?
If you're a health-care organization, you can use the money to tie together those back-end applications to improve health care and reduce patient mortality. So it really is an enterprise way.
We will say we are not in the consumer market. There's a lot of consumer Linux distributions out there that want everybody to buy them for their houses, but we are spilling into that market simply because of the strength of the product.
It's been quite a bit of fun. The kids take a look a the technology and say it's awesome.
JACK KAPICA: When kids get hold of an operating system and start playing with it, it takes off. Microsoft exploited that, but then Microsoft has been moving away from that strategy. I thought this would be a great opportunity for Novell, to make it possible for the kids to develop applications.
KATIE McAULIFF: For the open-source community, with the desktop, everything's open source, everything's available for them to go to play, to create. The open source community has had a tremendous impact on how you develop software today. Wouldn't you want to take advantage of the hundreds of thousands of people out there looking at the code, playing with the code, so you can get to the much greater outcome? It's the diversity of input, thoughts and ideas that you could never build inside commercial software development houses today.
