A-Z Linux Guide

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.

Read the complete conversation here