Likewise Blog
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Bring us your use cases, and let us know if you would like to participate in an upcoming beta!
Recently I joined the Likewise Software team as vice president of Business Development. One of the key reasons I joined the company was the increasing role I see Likewise playing in platform interoperability. Take for instance one project–initially introduced a little over a year ago and more recently updated: Likewise-CIFS client-side and server-side SMB/CIFS support, which provides Microsoft Windows clients access to folders and files on Linux, Unix, and Mac computers.
We are seeing a broad array of use cases for the Likewise-CIFS server. These include a Likewise-CIFS server virtual appliance, Likewise-CIFS as a NAS “head” on top of existing SAN devices, Likewise-CIFS as a front-end for cloud- based services such as Amazon S3, as well as supporting vendors looking to license our CIFS server capabilities as an OEM for a variety of other use cases (including HP and Data Domain).
Here are more details on a couple of use cases we’ve seen to date:
- We’ve had several customers in the midst of replacing legacy Windows desktops with Linux desktops on a large scale (1,000++ Linux desktop deployments). These customers are looking to use Likewise Enterprise to manage authentication and provisioning of users leveraging their existing investment in Active Directory (for most enterprises, AD works, it is typically tied to the HR systems, and administrators know how to use it effectively for supporting group policy, reporting, etc…). In addition, they frequently ask if we know of a solution to support a common home directory across Linux, Windows, and Macs where they can point their users. Supporting this with the Likewise-CIFS Server running on Linux married to Likewise Enterprise for ease of user administration makes sense.
- Several OEM partners have begun embedding Likewise-CIFS in their products – an example would be HP StorageWorks. The scalability, faster time to market, modular and tightly integrated code – as well as the ability to license under commercial terms – makes for a compelling option.
Do you have other potential use cases to consider beyond what we’ve detailed here? We’d love to hear from you.
So I am out at Red Hat Summit for the fourth year in a row, and it’s great to see some old friends — not to mention new ones (the crowds grow every year).
Speaking of old friends, one of our favorite integrators, Shadow-Soft, just won the Partner Catalyst award out here at Red Hat Summit. This kind of goes to show what I was talking about in my previous post: Likewise gives Systems Integrators so much flexibility — allowing flexibility of operating platform choice when trying to best figure out a client’s overall solution requirements. Not being tied down to Windows is rapidly making more and more sense for companies, and showing how Likewise can make Linux, Unix or Mac first-class citizens in a Windows environment turns many of our Systems Integrators into trusted solution providers. So congrats to the folks over at Shadow-Soft, you guys deserve it!
There are several reasons why Likewise Open dominates our category (and for the record, with something like 60 times the adoption of our nearest competitor). Two primary reasons have been the technical strength of the product and its availability under a free open source license. Years after we released Likewise Open, an astounding 50,000 organizations are using it and Likewise Enterprise to authenticate, secure, and manage Linux, Unix, and Mac – providing a single identity store with single sign-on across multiple platforms and leveraging organizations’ existing infrastructure and investment in Active Directory (and share files across those systems).
Open source isn’t just about free software. When done correctly it’s about building a company with a very different model–a model that allows us to invest more heavily in software engineers than our competitors. For our premium product, we can charge less for a better product because of our development model. While we’ve been driving continued year-over-year revenue growth, our computers have had the wobbles. We’ve seen the following from our competitors:
- Repeated and ongoing layoffs of developers and sales personnel
- Investment then pullback from overseas markets
- Off-shoring of core development to China.
- Using marketing bluster to distract from technical shortcomings
We’ve continued to grow our primary US-based development team as well as our European development team.
Likewise Open is more than just free; it has an active community helping us build, test and improve the project — not just making it a great platform, but significantly reducing the costs of development, accelerating our time to market, while providing a quality product. Companies like VMWare, Citrix, EMC, Novell, Canonical–not to mention hundreds of integrators that are part of the Likewise Open community.
Likewise Open has also proven to be an incredible on-ramp for those wanting to move to Likewise Enterprise. And that doesn’t even take into account what we are doing with Likewise-CIFS – which enables file sharing across those networks.
More to come on Likewise Open.
Next week is Red Hat Summit and we’ll be flying our colors in booth 7. In fact, this is our fourth year attending the event, and every year we’ve seen an increase in activity not just at the event but in the amount of Red Hat customers we are working with for Active Directory integration. Yep, we’re big fans of Red Hat — especially considering just how many of our customers use Red Hat as their primary server or desktop platform. And, we’re a previous winner of the Red Hat Innovation Award in the category of Enhanced Security.
As Barry Crist has noted, Red Hat is doing some exciting work in the Cloud, and we see them being successful there. Our developers work hard to make sure our software, both Likewise Open and Likewise Enterprise, works well with Red Hat’s.
These are some exciting times for both Red Hat and Likewise, as both companies redefine the future of interoperability in the datacenter. We’re doing this with commitment to community and open source, focused and driven engineering and development teams, and creative thinking by our executives and project managers that dares to push the envelope.
Here’s what Tracy Lothringer, Director of Strategic Alliances has to say about Red Hat:
“More than half of Likewise customer server licenses are on Red Hat — so our relationship with them is a critical one. Red Hat is moving well beyond data center oriented Unix migration and is reaching into the broader market. We’re seeing RHEL adoption in market segments that hadn’t been using Unix previously — representing new growth for Linux. These customers require solutions to unify their increasingly mixed environments.”
We’re really looking forward to this show. If you’re going, please let us know in the comments, email us at info@likewise.com, or come see us in booth number 7! We’re a ‘Silver Sponsor’ at this years’ show with a pretty good-sized booth, so we should be easy to find! Stop on by and say hello, see a demo of Likewise in action, and enter to win an iPad.
Event Details:
Red Hat Summit – Likewise in Booth 7
June 22-25th, 2010
Seaport Hotel and Seaport World Trade Center
One Seaport Lane
Boston, MA 02210
www.redhat.com/summit
One more thing to mention–on June 29th (Tuesday of the week after next) we’re hosting a joint webinar with Red Hat titled “Securing RHEL Servers with Likewise and Active Directory.” The webinar is free and we’re encouraging show attendees to invite others in their organization to the webinar as well as anyone else who would like to join. Register here
See you in Boston!
You could have easily missed this one. VMware and Novell announced they are expanding their strategic partnership.
There is a much bigger story here on two fronts. The first is that while the language in the release carefully avoids the word “free,” this is in fact how VMware’s vSphere customers will view this announcement. vSphere licensees are now also entitled to a license of SUSE Enterprise Server (SLES)–once the crown jewel of the SUSE business. For free. And software patches and updates. For free. I’m not going to make any prognostications about how this may or may not change the landscape, but I’m pretty sure that large VMware shops are going to at least take a pretty hard look at SUSE.
More details on the “free” part of this announcement on VMware’s site: SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware
The second story playing out in front of us I believe is a larger one. The value the OS has to IT operations has been waning over time. Of course this has almost always been true on the business side of the shop–they care much more about applications for example and not very much about whether servers run Linux or Windows or Solaris. But IT operations teams cared about operating systems because it was their foundation on top of which they built everything. The foundation is changing. It isn’t the operating system–it is becoming the virtualization layer. I believe the VMware / Novell announcement is another small step in the ongoing movement towards the complete commoditization of the operating system.
This announcement is also very relevant to our space. As I’ve previously blogged, customers are increasingly looking for common IT services across the hypervisor, guest operating systems (Windows and Linux) and various other management and application elements. Authentication is as often as not one of the first things that organizations want to unify across these layers and almost always this involves a mix of different operating environments.
Both VMware and Novell are Likewise partners and both are commercial licensees of various pieces of Likewise technology. Novell, both through their partnership with Microsoft and through their licensing of Likewise Enterprise for SUSE Enterprise Desktop, has been aggressive in differentiating around Linux/Windows interoperability. As we’ve previously announced, VMware licenses our authentication technology know as LWIS (Likewise Identity Services) which, when it ships shortly in vSphere, gives VMware customers the ability to manage privileged user access via Active Directory. Add in Likewise and SUSE and you have common authentication in mixed Windows environments across the hypervisor, SUSE and Windows guest OS instances, and various other applications. Very cool.
iPhones, iPads, apps and more…Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference is quite the spectacle these days in consumer markets. However, one thing that isn’t talked about much in the Apple-flavored gadget and rumor blogs is the enterprise presence at WWDC.
Likewise has always placed value in WWDC, and this year we’ve sent down members of our development team to San Francisco to participate again. They’ll be engaging with Apple developers and other vendor developers to exchange ideas and contribute toward furthering interoperability of Macs in Active Directory environments.
Likewise is the clear leader in our category in Mac support–and much of this is due to our relationship with the Apple development team. Likewise worked with Apple and is the only vendor that can offer native integration with Apple’s Workgroup Manager application, making it easy to manage Mac system settings remotely through Active Directory. We seamlessly integrate Macs with AD, allowing administrators to assign server access privileges based on AD accounts to Mac users. We also fully support Snow Leopard.
We’re excited for our team to get back from WWDC and use ideas exchanged at the show to further our technology leadership on the Mac. Stay tuned–we’re working hard on our technology for the Mac and we’ll be announcing new product features sometime later this year!
Great news!! The VAR Guy has named Likewise to his Open Source 50 report ranking us in the top 25.
The Open Source 50 is the VAR Guy’s annual look at open source in the IT channel. The annual survey tracks open source companies based on a range of variables, including the size, influence and growth of their partner programs. Also, The VAR Guy measures the percent of company revenues derived from channel partners.
Being recognized by the VAR Guy is a big deal for Likewise. We take the channel very seriously because of the value they deliver to end users. Many resellers, for instance, are currently selling into accounts that run Active Directory (this is by far the dominant directory out there — with stats as high as 90% penetration). They would like to be able to sell other platforms (Mac/Linux) because of the flexibility and cost savings but don’t have a way for customers to control and administer them. We solve that issue. Using the Likewise platform enables customers to use the operating system they want and need — and many can use our free platform, Likewise Open.
For system integrators, the Likewise platform sits at the heart of a company’s security and authentication center. Integrators love our solution not just as a way to generate revenue from services but also as a straight way to solve a pain point for their customer, again moving from vendor to trusted solution provider and separating themselves from their competitors.
The other great part of Likewise being included in this report — it recognizes the value of our open source roots. None of our commercial AD Bridge competitors have this incredible development and business model. Likewise Open provides thousands of users a fast, easy and free way to authenticate — and gives enterprise IT managers an easy path to the more robust and feature-rich Likewise Enterprise.
What great news for Likewise and our customers.
Back in January, our CEO and chief blogger, Barry Crist, did a couple posts, which are worth taking a look at:
Integrator: Wise Up with Likewise
Feel free to post your comment here or write to us at partners@likewise.com if you would like more information about working with Likewise.
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