Novell has refocused to recapture past glory: Attachmate

By returning its umbrella companies to their roots, the Attachmate Group hopes to reinvigorate its business strengths, according to the keynote addresses at the organisation’s Powerful Connection event in Sydney.

Attachmate Group CEO and chairman, Jeff Hawn, stressed in his speech the long history and experience of the companies under the Attachmate Group umbrella. He also highlighted how these businesses were returning to their roots, in particular, Suse and Novell which were relocating to their birthplaces of Nuremberg in Germany and Utah in the US, respectively.

This would help them recapture the innovation that initially helped the companies rise to prominence.

Novell and Attachmate president and GM, Bob Flynn, expanded on Hawn’s introduction by talking about Attachmate and Novell’s strategic directions and the ways they will support and ‘refocus’ their core capabilities to further engage with customers.

Novell in particular has experienced a renewed focus to become an independent business unit that will concentrate on the customers, partners and technologies it has traditionally viewed as its strengths.

“Novell will strive for engineering excellence in all of our products,” Flynn said.

While Flynn admitted that Novell may have “lost some of its glimmer” since its heydays, the company will work hard to recapture that by re-energising lasting relationships with partners and customers through listening to what’s important to them and delivering what they need.

“In addition to being customer driven, what is important for us is to make the old technology and investments of our customers work with their new one,” Flynn said.

KPMG forensic associate director, Stan Gallo, followed with a presentation entitled The Typical Fraudster, looking at what organisations can do to protect themselves from identity theft and fraud.

Gallo focused on highlighting the true impact of fraud, which goes beyond direct financial damage at affected companies to cover areas such as loss of customers, reputation damage, and absorption of management attention.

Forensic technology to investigate fraud has evolved to enable fraud investigators such as Gallo to recover evidence through data mining and analysis, as well as other techniques.

Globally, the typical fraudster was found to be a male between 36 to 45 years old and an employee in a senior management position; in A/NZ it tended to be a non-management employee about 38 years old on a salary of $113,000 per annum.

Gallo mentioned that 53 per cent of businesses experience at least one fraud incident, usually attributed to poor internal control. About one-third of those are detected.

To ensure that businesses do not become another addition to these statistics, Gallo recommends that companies set policies and audits, as well as engage in risk assessment, mitigation and monitoring.

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