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Putting Novell's SuSE Purchase In Perspective
An anonymous reader writes "
The editors over at NewsForge.com have combined their efforts to put today's big news about Novell's purchase of SUSE in perspective: what the news means in business terms and to the Linux community, today and in the future. A good read that includes quotes from industry insiders, IRC inhabitants, and NewsForge.com readers."
Another reader writes "This is a good analysis piece about how Linux has become Novell's lifeline, especially since NetWare's been dying...and post-Ximian."
They acted like it was no big deal, but...
(from article) "Yes, it was admitted there might be some marketing opportunities caused by Red Hat's recent "end of life" declaration for some of its products."
My guess is that this has more to do with the decision to buy than they are admitting to.
Is anybody else worried that this might turn into another Corel?
If Novell's got problems keeping up in terms of IT relevence as it is with its own core product, it could be really nasty if some of that starts to rub off on Suse and Ximian.
I don't mean to troll. I just liked it better when all these things were separated. I'd rather unification through proper standards (eg: LSB compliance) than through pocketbooks.
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
About a year ago I was discussing with my friends this very scenario. It was a great decision on Novell's part, probably IMHO the only thing that could allow them to rebound back to the forefront. If they use Linux (open source) as their desktop rather than relying on Microsoft to be fair players they will be able to make a better product for the desktop.
I remember when people thought of networking they thought of Novell. I took a Win2k class not to long ago and the only people that knew about Netware was myself, one more person, and the instructor. Hopefully that will change with e-directory on the back end and Linux on the desktop. Although any company isn't 100% idealistic, Novell is far more open standard minded than Microsoft will ever be.
What happened to the standard "Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN" disclaimer that normally appears at the end of items that reference Newsforge articles?
- If Novell bought Ximian just for Mono, they should open source the Exchange Connector.
- If Novell intends to still support KDE on SuSE, they should say so quickly.
- Novell should DEFINITELY keep the desktop distro free. This will be key in infiltration and getting techies involved and informed.
- Novell should rebrand everything "LinuxWare" in following their NetWare line.
- NDS on Linux should be a huge priority. A successful, non-piecemeal central authentication system for Linux would be fantastic (yes, I know about PAM + LDAP, etc)
- A Novell client for Linux (even for 5.x and 6.x) should get official support TODAY.
- They should learn from the past, and invest in the desktop. That's where they'll sell this to potential customers, as and end to end solution.
They should also resurrect SuSE's previous efforts in supporting the Power architecture, which more and more appears to be what will be competing with AMD64 (or vice versa.)
And not only should they keep the desktop distro free, they should create a Live Distro on CD and print up a few hundred million of them and make sure that everybody and their cat has a copy, a la AOL.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
There are still a lot of Novell users out there, especially among certain groups (education, government, healthcare, law offices). I recently attended a CNA class, and all of the attendees fell into one of those catagories.
Novell actually has some pretty cool products out there, such as iFolder (syncs data between computers and a server), NetStorage (lets you access network drives from any computer with a web browser), and iPrint (lets users install their own printers via a web browser). They might not have a lot of new users, but they have a lot of old users who have no plans on changing - and they are coming out with some products that are actually pretty good.
Plus it's nice that our GroupWise email system resists most of those fun Outlook-based viruses.
I have blog like everyone else
Why don't you go to the Novell site and look at the SEC filings. You'll see exactly where there money comes from and where it goes. Just like any publicly held company, they gotta tell the public.
No sense speculating. Just do the research. From teh 2002 filing:
" We managed to maintain large network site-license revenue at $681 million, approximately flat to fiscal 2001"
"Novell's revenue, including the addition of revenue from recent acquisitions, was up eight percent to $1.13 billion, and cash flow from operations during the year was a positive $51 million. "
"Cash and short term investments on our balance sheet stood at $636 million at the end of fiscal 2002. Novell had no debt, and total assets were at $1.7 billion."
From the 10G for 4/2003
NOVELL, INC.
CONSOLIDATED CONDENSED BALANCE SHEETS
April 30, 2003 October 31, 2002
In thousands, except share and per share data (Unaudited)
Assets
Current assets:
Cash and short-term investments $ 626,397 $ 635,858
Receivables (less allowances of $32,677 - April 30,
2003 and $39,676 - October 31, 2002)
183,672
214,827
Prepaid expenses 32,293 24,077
Deferred income taxes 19,420 21,204
Other current assets 25,166 23,572
Total current assets 886,948 919,538
Property, plant and equipment, net 353,183 369,189
Goodwill 180,579 179,534
Intangible assets 30,092 36,351
Long-term investments 55,603 73,452
Deferred income taxes 83,791 74,323
Other assets 12,385 12,678
Total assets $ 1,602,581 $ 1,665,065
Liabilities and Stockholders' Equity
Current liabilities:
Accounts payable $ 61,007 $ 57,241
Accrued compensation 78,498 87,778
Other accrued liabilities 124,337 134,850
Income taxes payable 28,764 36,294
Deferred revenue 267,546 275,344
Total current liabilities 560,152 591,507
Minority interests 7,841 8,016
Stockholders' equity:
Common stock, par value $.10 per share:
Authorized - 600,000,000 shares;
Issued -371,295,559 shares-April 30, 2003,
367,537,926 shares-October 31, 2002 37,130 36,753
Preferred stock, par value $.10 per share;
Authorized - 500,000 shares, Issued - 0 shares -- --
Additional paid-in capital 303,760 297,139
Retained earnings 698,164 738,663
Accumulated other comprehensive income 651 57
Other (5,117) (7,070)
Total stockholders' equity 1,034,588 1,065,542
Total liabilities and stockholders' equity $ 1,602,581 $ 1,665,065
- Sig this!
It's even better than what Nat says ;)
:) Of course, I'd be lying if I told you that I can guarantee it'll be perfect going forward- but so far all the signs are very positive for that.
- for the first time ever, we've been able to open up our Ximian Desktop development process. You can get basically every patch we write on desktop built and applied to GNOME 2.4/2.5 via the xd-unstable channel.
- if you poke through gnome CVS, we've got skeletal code for a groupwise connector there. Again, something the old novell would never have done- release not only free code, but basically defacto API docs by way of code as well.
- up until the suse purchase this morning, we actually had a link to gnome.org on the front page of novell.com. Look around for a link to gnome.org on sun's site- it's not on the front page, and it's not in the Java Desktop main page, either.
So, like I said... it's even better than Nat says it is.
IAAL,BIANLY
Perhaps few people are still rolling out Netware installations, as such seems to be much of the public demand. But I must say, Netware is much more stable than Windows in vitually every situation I've deployed either in.
A small medical office I did an installation for had the Netware 3.12 box stay up, for around 1260 days. (Nearly *four* years without a single reboot.) It went down the time before that, only because of a four+ hour power outage that the UPS couldn't outlive. It has been up for like 500 days prior to that. So, total unrebooted uptime, was more than five years. Not a single unplanned outage caused by software failure, and no planned outages/crashes either.
Heck, in 1992-1993 I'd have killed for a Windows box that could file serve for that long without constant prodding and TLC - along with at least weekly reboots.
Novell's eDirectory is much more mature, IMHO than AD, and their ability to produce a product that simply works well is light years ahead.
Finally, Novell, perhaps to their harm always was the kind of company that left lots of space for others to develop products along side them. They made a core product, and let others fill in and provide apps around them. This kind of community is crucial IMHO, and the Novell culture, at least in the past, was good at allowing it.
I think this may be a great match.
Cheers,
Greg