Hovsepian recently replaced Jack Messman as CEO of Waltham, Massachusetts-based Novell as the company’s board grew frustrated at slow progress under its former chief.
Talking to Computer Business Review, Hovsepian said Novell’s customers and partners should not expect any major changes of focus now that he is in charge, but should expect the company to be quicker and more decisive.
The leadership has been working together for the last six months on this and I feel we’re in lock step, he said. In terms of executing that, there’s one less box I have to check now. I can go a little faster.
Novell’s performance has been a frustrating one for shareholders and Wall Street Analysts alike since it acquired Linux vendors SUSE Linux and Ximian and began a difficult transition from a slow but steady NetWare maintenance business to the cut and thrust of Linux deployments.
Hovsepian revealed that the frustration has also been felt within the company, with internal morale surveys pointing to a more proactive leadership style. We do measure our employee engagement and they have said they wanted a stronger set of management and decisiveness, he said. It’s a standard review of how management is judged and that will continue. We’ve got 5,000 people here and I know I’m not the one who’ll turn this around, I’m just one of 5,000.
Hovsepian maintained that there will be no major changes in terms of the company’s product strategy, but said Novell is on the look-out for acquisition to add more value in terms of management-level services and technologies.
What we have to focus on is the strategy and our strategy is to make sure Linux is the centerpiece of what we get done for open source and what we get done for the company and shareholders, he said, adding that the company will also continue to focus on identity and access management making the most of better than industry growth in those segments.
We need to make sure we deliver those to support Linux, he said. I’ve also talked about non-organic growth, there’s obviously some gaps and we will make acquisitions to fill in gaps on the management services side to support what we’re doing with Linux.
Novell was heavily criticized by investors including Blum Capital and Credit Suisse First Boston analyst Jason Maynard in late 2005. A number of the improvements they suggested – a share buyback, headcount reduction, and the sale of its Celerant Consulting unit – have now been carried out by Novell.
Hovsepian maintained that the moves were not a direct response to criticism but said that the company was also expected to follow through on one of the other suggestions: making acquisitions to move up the open source stack.
We actually had plans in place to do a number of the events they asked for, it’s just the timeframes were out of step. I do see the opportunity to do things up the stack, but what I mean by that is management services, in terms of identity and access management, and resource management. I do not see us becoming an application level provider.
Hovsepian has been leading Novell’s attempts to improve its sales performance since he became president of worldwide field operations in May 2005 to transfer the improvements he had brought about in North America in 2005 to Europe and Asia Pacific.
In March he told Computer Business Review that he had put the company’s EMEA sales force on warning that he expects to see improvement by the end of the year. With those improvements ongoing, Hovsepian said the company also needs to focus on simplifying things for our customers and employees.
For example our renewals process is very intensive, in July we’ll be delivering a new customer renewal centre to solve this problem with more self-service, he said. The Novell Customer Renewal Center will be a central, self-service service for getting licenses and support for Novell’s products.
