Novell Not Dumping Netware

jerel writes "eWeek describes how Novell will still develop and support NetWare. The eWeek article quotes Bruce Lowry, a top spokesman for Novell as saying, 'The bottom line is no. The whole thing with Linux is an additive thing. We're not dumping NetWare, we're adding Linux.' NetWare 7.0 will allow users to either upgrade to the latest version of the NetWare kernel or move to Linux." I guess this answers any lingering doubts going around.

Comments

UnixWare

[conway]

Novell has already tried this unix strategy with Unixware. They purchased the original unix team from USL (Unix System Labs), (which was there from AT&T) and had them work on Unixware.
It turned out however, that the Novell sales team only knew how to sell Netware, and Unixware got nowhere. (Wow, that almost rhymes! :) )

After about 5 years they sold the group to HP, to work on HP-UX, which kept them for another 5 years or so, and then closed the site and lay everyone off. (After they successfully ported HP-UX to the Itanium platform). C'est la vie.

NetWare is good

[candyuk]

Novell's core strategy has been to leverage it's existing technology (NetWare and eDirectory) to get the company into more profitable markets. That doesn't mean that NetWare is a dead or dying product. In fact NetWare 6 has been a big seller for the company. However idiot analysts (Gartner et al) don't know anything about any technology that doesn't have a mouse and pretty gui. You can't run Word on NetWare so many people don't care about the OS. More importantly NetWare is widely interoperable so that security authentication, resource sharing and other services function on almost any platform going. Imagine a world where HR could input the name of a new employee into the Personnel system with a start date. The network security system would detect that new employee and create a login account, email address and file share without any user intervention. Then imagine that all these functions use software from different vendors. Thats what Novell brings to the table. Put that in your bigoted pipes and smoke it.