Today, GWAVA announced an expansion of a strategic partnership that we have had with Novell for over 12 years. You can read the full press release here. Novell’s portfolio includes some of the best products available in the market today. It makes sense to expand GWAVA’s leading product lines to support even more of Novell’s products. This expansion will provide even more value to customers for their investment in Novell technologies. In the coming months, more details of technical integrations and promotional bundling of our products will be unveiled.
For me personally, being a loyal Novell partner is very important. I started my career at Novell. I spent over 16 years working with incredibly talented and passionate people, building some of the best products available in the market. In 2005, I was blessed to become part of the GroupWise community when I moved from the ZENworks team to run the GroupWise Engineering team. The GroupWise community is a very tight group of customers and partners that are passionate about Novell products and the role they play in their IT environments. They are passionate about each other and taking care of their community. It’s a great group of professionals, and I’m proud to be associated with them.
Throughout my years at Novell, I watched GWAVA grow to a point where the vast majority of GroupWise customers also use GWAVA products. I was always impressed with the people at GWAVA, and more impressed with what my Novell customers said about GWAVA and their products. In 2010, Novell performed a financial analysis of the GroupWise customer base. It was concluded that Novell customers that augmented their GroupWise investment with GWAVA’s products, like Reload, GWAVA and Retain, were much more satisfied with their GroupWise investment. It was also established that GWAVA customers were much less likely to consider migration to a competing email platform, than customers of competing products.
In 2011, I was honored to become GWAVA’s CEO. We implemented a series of broad strategies, primarily around our Retain product, to ensure that we were the leader in a concept we pioneered called “Unified Archiving”. We built an extensible interface to Retain and then built “Collectors” to cover all the ways people communicate and collaborate. We already had a collector for GroupWise, and added additional collectors for Exchange, Office365 and Gmail. We then built a social media collector to archive Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Lync, Yammer, Google Hangouts, and various instant messaging tools. GWAVA has also become the leader in mobile archiving with collectors that archive SMS and MMS communications on BlackBerry®, Android and iOS.
Our strategy has paid off with Retain tripling in size in just two years and today over half of GWAVA’s company revenue comes from products that are not specific to Novell products. HOWEVER, we have done all this and grown our customer base while remaining a true and loyal partner to Novell. Competitors have come and gone, and I even watched several during my tenure at Novell turn against Novell in an attempt to make a quick buck. I’m proud of what we have accomplished at GWAVA. We’ve done it while still remembering our partner in Novell, and the Novell Customers that helped us get to where we are today as a company.
I’m excited for these next 6 months. GWAVA will be working to provide the absolute best unified security and compliance for all your Novell investments. We are going to bridge and combine Novell GroupWise, Messenger, Vibe, FILR and ZENworks together with GWAVA and Retain. If you haven’t seen a recent update on GWAVA’s roadmap, or if you want to know more, I invite you to reach out to me (kmuir@gwava.com), any GWAVA employee or your local GWAVA partner for a briefing.
Hope to see you at BrainShare!
– Ken
