The 451 Group has recently published a Spotlight report focused on Novell’s strategy as it relates to open source software.

The report is particularly relevant given speculation that private equity firms might be about to acquire the company and break it up, and takes a look at the importance of open source to Novell beyond well-known initiatives such as openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise.

The recent reorganisation of Novell’s assets placed the focus on Intelligent Workload Management (IWM), and brought the Identity and Security, Systems and Resource Management, and Open Platform Solutions divisions together into the Security, Management and Operating Platforms business unit.

While the company is placing less emphasis on the Linux and open source technologies that represented the bulk of the former Open Platform Solutions business unit, open source is no less important to Novell.

In the parlance of The 451 Group’s open source strategy assessment, Novell is expanding on an Open Complement model (using open source to drive interest in its complementary products and services) to add an Open Inside model (building proprietary software products around open source software projects).

The latter is evident in Cloud Manager and Pulse: two new products due for release later this year. Cloud Manager draws on a number of open source projects, such as the OpenESB service bus project, Hibernate for database abstraction, and the Enunciate Web services engine.

Similarly the Pulse real-time collaboration product is based on a combination of closed and open technologies, including Google Wave and Google’s Operational Transformation algorithm, as well as the open source Apache Hadoop data processing framework and Apache Lucene and Solr.

There’s a lot more detail in the report itself, which examines Novell’s Linux-based revenue, the role of Linux within IWM, the company’s community development engagements, and provides more detail on Novell’s Open Complement and Open Inside approaches to OSS, as well as comparison with competitors.

The report is available to existing clients now, while non-clients are, as always, able to apply for trial access via the same link.

Those with an interest in Novell may also be interested in our recent Target IQ report, which examines potential strategic buyers for the company.