BrainShare 2000, Day 3 - 3/29/00

Day 2: was spent at numerous technical sessions...

Day 3:

This morning's keynote had a different flavor from Novell's traditional partner keynotes. Dubbed BrainShow, it was conducted in a style similar to Dave Letterman's Late Show -- complete with pencils, live band (the Brainiacs), and cohost bandleader (Kent Prows of Amigo fame). Carl Ledbetter, Novell Senior VP for Bisuness and Corporate Development, said of the new format that it was a perfect way to spice up the keynote, as well as keep featured guests within a specific time frame.

The show started exactly as he intended: with a little spice. Carl took the opportunity to joke about Microsoft's Active Directory having 64,000 bugs reported. He quipped that he remembered the days when 64k for a computer was good. "We're not going to be bullied around by Microsoft or anybody," he said in a post-BrainShow interview. "We're out there, and we're winning."

Next, he introduced a spoof guest list composed of Al Gore, Bill Gates (who was on loan from the Department of Justice), and Jennifer Lopez, who was not granted entry into Salt Lake City because of her skimpy dress. He then appealed to geeks by giving a dialog about how to solve the Rubic's Cube (which he wrote the solution manual for), complete with live demonstration.

The real guests followed. Rich Nortz, senior vice president of Novell Customer Services (NCS), took the opportunity to plug his programs (consulting, education, and technical support), the highlight of which was the culmination of the Drive for Five campaign. The drive was the result of a campaign to get all CNEs upgraded to NetWare 5x certification, and the prize was sweet indeed: a Harley Davidson Fat Boy.

The crowd went wild as the final five candidates were ushered on to the stage. Debbie Maucieri, Education VP, pulled the winning name out of a hat and Chris Hupton drove out of the room on his new bike.

Other guests of the BrainShow included execs from Sun Microsystems, Lucent, Intel, and IBM. Each took the opportunity to validate that the companies and Novell were working together in a common direction, though they made no new product announcements. Later, Ledbetter said that the non-announcements were intentional. "Nobody wants to sit around for two hours listening to announcements about products that don't concern them," he said, "so we moved a lot of the product announcements into sessions where people will care."

The only exception was Ledbetter's final guest, CEO and president of Tucows Elliott Noss. Noss announced that Tucows, the largest third-party software distributor in the world, will provide digitalme to all of its users. "We're comfortable that digitalme is the best tool in the identity management space," he said. "Our goal is to put digitalme on as many desktops as possible," he promised, amid cheers from the BrainShare faithful. (see below)

The announcement culminated several references to digitalme throughout the show -- including Sun's announcement that they had created a billion-user tree in NDS running on Solaris -- and made good on the promise that even with a billion user tree, the "metree will be free."

Announcement

TUCOWS.com Deploys Novell's digitalme and NDS eDirectory For Consumers to Streamline Their Online Purchases
SALT LAKE CITY (BRAINSHARE) -- March 29, 2000 -- TUCOWS.com Inc. (www.tucows.com) and Novell Inc. (NASDAQ:NOVL) today announced that TUCOWS.com will be the first mebusiness* to use Novell's digitalme* identity services, a secure Net service that extends customer relationships, simplifies online purchasing and protects consumers' identity on the Internet. Launched in October 1999, Novell's digitalme stores personal information, such as passwords, user names, account numbers, contact information and preferences securely and privately in NDSŪ eDirectory*, eliminating the need to remember multiple passwords and usernames. Not unlike a personal electronic stamp, digitalme allows consumers to have complete access and control over their personal information, which can be amended, shared or deleted for different audiences.

"With over 10 million end users, TUCOWS.com is well positioned to deploy digitalme as the mebusiness tool for consumers," said Elliot Noss, CEO, TUCOWS.com Inc. "digitalme is an easy-to-use Internet service that streamlines purchasing, protects consumers' privacy and provides our customers with the greatest level of control over their information."

Novell's Net services software, such as digitalme and NDS eDirectory, allows organizations to simplify, secure and accelerate their eBusiness environments. Net services is a category of software that secures and powers all types of networks -- whether Internet, intranets, and extranets, wired to wireless, corporate and public -- as one Net, across all leading operating environments. With NDS eDirectory as its foundation, digitalme provides a means for organizations to easily manage their Net relationships through customer registration services, secure and private user interaction and other identity services. Organizations can use these services to better attract, delight and retain customers on the Net.

"Today's announcement demonstrates the value of Novell's Net services software, such as eDirectory and digitalme, for providers developing their hosted services offerings," said Steve Adams, senior vice president of worldwide marketing, Novell. "TUCOWS will be able to extend its significant market leadership by offering these new Net identity services to their end users and over 800 network partners worldwide."

About TUCOWS.com Inc. (www.tucows.com)

TUCOWS has over 100 million page views per month - one of the busiest sites on the Internet. With over 800 network partners in more than 90 countries hosting TUCOWS' software libraries, TUCOWS is the largest independent software distribution network in the world providing users with fast, local downloads. TUCOWS software libraries house nearly 40,000 applications for Windows, Linux, PDA/Handhelds, BeOS, Mac, Games, Themes, Music and Kids.

TUCOWS is also the fastest growing wholesaler of domain registration solutions through its TUCOWS Names division, supporting over 2,000 Registration Service Providers worldwide.

John Bezy
Novell Systems Engineer
Iowa/Nebraska
ph: (402) 291-1808
fax: (402) 291-4529
jbezy@novell.com