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Attachmate bets big on Indian market

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CIOL Bureau
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BANGALORE, INDIA: Last year, Seattle-based Attachmate Corp. bought Novell for USD 2.2 billion. But that isn't the only reason why the company has been in the limelight for quite sometime.

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Boris Ivancic, vice president and general manager, Asia Pacific  Attachmate, Novell, NetIQ, and SUSE Business Units Attachmate as a group is betting big for the Indian market with its four business units Attachmate, NetIQ, Novell and SUSE to capitalize on the market growth opportunities, while driving revenue.

In an interaction with CIOL, Boris Ivancic, vice president and general manager, Asia Pacific  Attachmate, Novell, NetIQ, and SUSE Business Units said, “India is a significant market for the Attachmate group considering that the country is clocking a growth of 7.7 per cent in terms of GDP.”

Ivancic also briefed about Novell's offerings and how important is openSUSE project for Attachmate as a group.

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CIOL: It’s been a year since the acquisition of Novell from Attachmate. What are the changes that Attachmate is witnessing after the acquisition of Novell?

Boris Ivancic: In a nutshell, we are a larger and more aligned organization with well defined focus areas to suit our divergent client requirements.

At our core, we are structured in a way to accommodate this diverse yet growing market. We operate under four business units - Attachmate, NetIQ, Novell and SUSE - while being united under a single holding company named "The Attachmate Group".

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This makes us one of the largest, privately-held enterprise software holding companies in the market today, valued at over USD 1 billion and this structure ensures that there is more focus with respect to R&D, development and support, along with sales and marketing engines for the product lines under each business unit and dedicated resources for each business unit too.

CIOL: How about openSUSE? And how do you want to capitalize on the growing market?

BV: The SUSE business unit focuses on the Linux portfolio including the openSUSE elements. NetIQ is acclaimed to provide the identity and access, security and compliance and data center management solutions. Novell focuses on collaboration, end-point management, plus file and networking services.

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Thus we see an enhanced GTM approach providing more breadth in terms of coverage while at the same time more depth with regard to solutions and the associated support and service offerings. With this approach, we expect to capitalize on the market growth opportunities, while driving revenue.

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CIOL: Can you highlight the key areas, which Attachmate focuses on? And out of the key areas that you have specified, which one sector you think has got big scope of growth in India?

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BV: From India perspective, we see strong potential for growth within the avenues of:

Open platforms solutions (SUSE).

Security related s/w offerings like identity and access management as well as compliance management (NetIQ).

Collaboration and end-point security and management offerings (Novell).

The Government/PSU today is one of the largest IT buyers for us.  We are today a prominent player within the Government/PSU space and our components are under deployment with several Government projects on a large scale. Our focus sectors in India apart from those just mentioned would include BFSI, manufacturing, education and IT/ITES.

CIOL: What are the plans from Attachmate for Novell's offerings?

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BV: Novell as an operating unit of the Attachmate Group will continue to being customer and partner centric, providing best-in-breed solutions in the areas of collaboration, end-point management, plus file and networking services.

From a product perspective, the next quarter, and early 2012 will witness new releases of our core products: Novell GroupWise, Novell ZENworks, Novell Open Enterprise Server and Novell Vibe.

We are also excited about growth opportunities available in cloud-based enterprise email (offered by HostedEM), endpoint management, social collaboration, application virtualization and files.

CIOL: What is the latest update on openSUSE and How important is openSUSE project for Attachmate ?

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BV: openSUSE 12.1 is the first openSUSE release since the new SUSE business unit was created following the acquisition of Novell. In these few months, SUSE and openSUSE have been very engaged together. This release brings many new improvements from the desktop to the underlying infrastructure and also marks introduction of GNOME 3.2, ownCloud, Snapper and much more.

openSUSE is becoming a more and more dynamic project with a growing, global contributor base, the possibilities for new innovation are unlimited  - ARM, Cloud, development tools etc. SUSE, as the primary sponsor but also as many people who personally use the distribution and contribute to the project, are completely committed to the continued growth of the openSUSE project and we are passionate about its success just as we are about our business.

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CIOL: Can you highlight how openSUSE project is doing? And contribution from openSUSE?

BV: As an independent community, openSUSE contributors innovate and build what they're passionate about and enjoy doing. This innovation isn't directed or controlled by SUSE — it's a very free and open project. In fact, that's exactly why the relationship between openSUSE and SUSE works so well and partly why openSUSE is such a great project for contributors to join in.

Introducing people to the world of free and open source software (FOSS) has always been a priority for the openSUSE project. We’re not only doing so for new users with our distribution or for new contributors with our project, we also frequently participate in programs such as Google's Summer of Code or Code in.

Those programs have introduced a lot of new contributors to both openSUSE and the FOSS community. After successful participation in Google Summer of Code this year, openSUSE will also participate in Google Code-in.

CIOL: If you were to highlight the Indian R&D, especially Bangalore center, what are the latest innovations that are happening and how much does the Bangalore R&D center contributes to Attachmate’s product portfolio?

BV: The R&D facility in India is the largest facility for the Attachmate group across the world, dedicated to development/enhancement of our core products. In India, the development is primarily around the Novell (Zenworks portfolio), NetIQ (cloud manager and could security) and SUSE (open platforms) businesses. This technology innovation hub provides immense backing to our efforts to constantly innovate and improve on our offerings. The availability of support teams helps address customer needs as well. The R&D facility also provides a platform to demo/showcase the breadth of our offerings to customers around the world.

CIOL: As a company focusing on providing open source solutions as one of the area, how do you see the adoption of open source in Indian enterprises?

BV: It is interesting to see that enterprises and government entities are now driving the adoption of open source related products to achieve business benefits as opposed to a platform that were patronized by developers during its initial stages. As industry estimates have reported, open source in India has been clocking a steady 20-30 per cent growth year-on-year over the last three years and this is expected to continue.

The Linux server operating system (OS) has grown its way to a prominent position in the Indian server OS market, with its adoption rate increasing from 7.0 per cent to 8.1 per cent. Demand is coming from a wide range of verticals including the government, education and enterprise segments.

There is also a surge in demand from small and medium enterprises.

We believe that open source adoption would continue to grow as experts have predicted, not just because of the flexibility and TCO benefits that it offers, but also as we move towards the cloud, aspects such as adaptability, portability and being hardware independent would take top priority, whereby pushing back the complexities that a proprietary platform involves.

CIOL: How does Attachmate see India as a market for its expansion ?

BV: India is a significant market for the Attachmate group considering that the country is clocking a growth of 7.7 per cent in terms of GDP. It is one of the markets which has been minimally affected by the recent global meltdown and continues to grow. This could be attributed to a strong domestic market rather than total dependency on an outsourcing model.

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