Who will champion Novell’s open source strategy?

It’s official! Novell is a Linux company.

That might not come as a surprise to many of you. After all, Novell bought Suse Linux, the No. 2 Linux vendor (after rival Red Hat), in November 2003. But when I spoke to then-CTO Alan Nugent last June, he was still hesitant to fly the open source flag too high. Instead, he referred to Novell as a “hybrid source company.”

Not much has changed in Novell’s business plan since then. Proprietary network-management and identity products remain its core suite of revenue generators despite the fact that they’re now built atop an open source foundation. At its recent BrainShare 2005 conference, however, the company’s message was more emphatic than ever. In his keynote address, CEO Jack Messman proclaimed a two-pronged strategy for Novell’s future. One pillar, as usual, was identity. The other? You guessed it. Linux, Linux, Linux.

With the release of Suse Linux Enterprise Server 9, Novell made it clear that it intended to give Red Hat a run for its money in the booming Linux server market. Now, with NLD (Novell Linux Desktop) 9 shipping to customers, the company is putting together a serious bid to challenge Microsoft for the desktop space.

The first release of NLD is targeted mainly at high-volume environments that need a limited number of applications, according to Nat Friedman, who has headed up Novell’s desktop efforts since it acquired Ximian, the company he co-founded, in August 2003. Although Novell is loathe to announce a formal desktop road map, at BrainShare Friedman told me he’s definitely not satisfied with the low end. Having witnessed the enthusiasm with which he and fellow Ximian founder Miguel de Icaza discuss their latest projects, I believe him.

Meanwhile, Novell seems to be making all the right moves to bolster a business built around Linux and open source. Its Hula project, which I’ve discussed before, seems aimed at wooing customers who feel tied to Microsoft because of Exchange, and the new NetWare Client for Linux will help existing Novell customers migrate to Linux at their own pace. There’s Open Enterprise Server, the long-awaited rewrite of Novell’s proprietary software stack; it runs on NetWare and Linux interchangeably. And a new initiative called Novell Market Start aims to help ISVs accelerate new open source projects.

As I said, all the right moves — and yet, despite the encouraging news from BrainShare, I still couldn’t shed my skepticism. As I watched Messman’s keynote, I saw a man clearly unaccustomed to addressing the public, a man who flubbed his lines and spoke with the cadence of a trained politician, not with the unabashed zeal of a Friedman or de Icaza. He’s no Steve Ballmer, either. Rather, Messman strikes me as a holdover from a different Novell, a company that sold software only to men in suits, arrogant in the belief that nobody would ever dump its products for ones from an upstart such as Microsoft.

I couldn’t help but ask myself: Was this really the man with the vision and drive to transform Novell from a networking-software vendor whose star has faded into one of the most prominent open source companies around?

Chris Stone, the man widely credited with spearheading Novell’s new direction, resigned in November. Just days before BrainShare came the news that Alan Nugent had left. If Novell wants to pull itself up by its bootstraps, it needs to crown its new visionaries, and fast. Where to look, I wonder?