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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."
All they need is to revoke SCO's UNIX license and all of Linux companies become Novell's property automatically.
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.
Well it is great that Novell has embraced linux big time but whether it is late or not is yet to be seen. Recent SCO drama does not seem to have affected Novell's plans, which is good since it shows positive signs that they are not too concerned about SCO lawsuits. One thing Novell should do is to make sure that they continue devlopment on Mono. Why? because this may encourage more developers to work on it which means more application for Unix/Linux. Remember that Windows is not the reason people still use it but it is because of the application which run on it .It also makes the life of the developer easy since maintaining two versions of source code is huge headache.
You're trolling, but I'll bite. Novell is sitting on a mountain of cash and short term investments, making them a 1 billion dollar company. If their revenue stopped coming TODAY, they would be able to fully operate for at least 3 years. And I just did a NetWare 6 deployment a few months ago, and it is rock solid.
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?
Government Contracts.
Novell needs to position SuSE Linux primarily as a server OS and continue to market their products as a back-end solution vs. Windows Server 2003. They can save the desktop battle for another day. They stand a better chance of making desktop inroads once their server Linux product has gotten them good press and more customers.
Lousy minor setbacks! This world sucks! -- Homer Simpson
Well, eDirectory (NDS) is their flagship product, and is the best X.500 directory on the market. Next is ZENworks, the best desktop management solution according to Gartner Group. And they can both run on at least Linux, Windows, and especially on NetWare. I wouldn't say ignorant, just misinformed or uniformed. Now you can say you are informed. :)
Technically (well, OK, from a marketing perspective more than anything), the only platforms NDS ever ran on were NetWare, Windows, and Solaris.
eDirectory is the current directory product; Linux support was added around the release of eDirectory 8.5 if memory serves.
There's also (at least) DirXML, NetMail, and soon the NetWare Services for Linux (currently in open beta).
And then there's the whole training thing - the Certified Linux Engineer program has been in the works for some time (heck, it was announced at BrainShare 2003 in April).
I think it's safe to say that Novell is "betting the farm" on its Linux future. All the signs are there - so if they don't do a good job pulling it all together, the company won't survive this. I seriously doubt this will be another WordPerfect-type acquisition.
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!
You haven't used much netware have you ?
Novell servers have a rep for rock solid stability. They have been bricked into walls and run for years. I can't think of any working server that compares with netware for uptime, and when it comes to security take a look at the NSA ratings where novell stands.
What Novell is known for is reliability. Their directory services work a hell of alot better than Microsofts. This counts for alot in most corporate environments.
Simply put Novell linux has alot more corporate credibility than any other name except maybe (IBM or Microsoft) linux. This is a tremendous push forward for Linux in general. Especially when you consider they want the desktop and redhat just doesn't seem to care anymore.
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
Red Hat made public its end of life plans at the end of last year. Slashdot's big hoopla the other day was a leeetle delayed. See the original announcement. Anyone paying even a slight bit of attention shouldn't have been surprised -- there was even relatively-widespread analysis in the geek press.
Novell could be half a year behind and still have time for "months of negotiations". And it's a big company, so it's not suprising for something like this to take that long.
Netware is a great & stable network operating system but difficult for developers compared to Windows. So Novell can hook into the Open Source community and get access to the largest base of developers
With Novell's global support & partners they can provide a very nice alternative.
A eDirectory enabled distributed network of Netware X servers (SUSE) with Desktop X workstations (Ximian) all kept up to date with ZenWorks X (Red Carpet) would be a nice solution for a lot of companies.
ps I'm trademarking those product names! ;-)
Cheers
VikingBrad
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
... but it occurs to me that many of you youngsters may never have worked with Novell products at all.
If they have preserved their technical culture through the last eight or ten years, then Novell is likely to be a very, very good fit with Linux. Netware was always clumsy and arcane to administer, at least at first; the learning curve was steep. (sound familiar?) But once you understood it, you could see WHY they had done it the way they did, and their solutions were often brilliant. In exchange for up-front learning curve, you got power under the hood. (sound familiar?)
Windows was all sexy and nice-looking, and it was a lot easier to administer up front, but it didn't have anywhere NEAR the depth of thought behind it. As of NT 4.0, Microsoft's first real competition to Netware, things like print services were a joke. You could share a printer, sure, but what if you wanted to share a pool of printers? What if you wanted an automatic fallback to a backup printer that wasn't ordinarily in the pool? What if you wanted to share the same printer across several print queues? Even several print POOLS? With Novell, any of these things were easily possible, though they did take some time to get set up. (arcane, remember?) Things like this were just flat not possible on NT 4. I'm not sure they're doable even NOW, to be honest. And Microsoft introduced Active Directory, to great fanfare, with Windows 2000; Novell had Novell Directory Services something like FIVE YEARS BEFORE. It seemed to me that NDS was, as usual, better thought out and more powerful, but when I was looking at AD, my NDS experience was several years out of date, so that could be mistaken. (I never got much past beginner-level with either directory service, FWIW.)
At any rate, the buzz in the NT 4.0 timeframe was all about "application services". This was shorthand for "you can write and run your own server software", which was very difficult to do on Netware. Netware was an EXTREMELY closed architecture. If they have retained that mindset, that's going to be the biggest likely sticking point. Windows was more open and cheaper, so it prospered, just as Linux is completely open and cheaper still. Novell may have a hard time with this issue.
At any rate, Netware servers were nearly uncrashable. It could happen: I had one customer who could crash his server just by running a particular application. But by and large, you could literally install Netware on a PC, put it in the closet, and forget about it for five years. Or longer. It would just run and run and run and always work and never break. I'm DEAD SERIOUS when I say "five years uptime"; Novell reliability made even Linux look kind of amateurish. You could pretty much expect that once you turned off the monitor and left the room, that the server would continue to run until the hardware broke. It was that good.
Assuming they've preserved their technical culture , Novell probably knows more about reliability than any other living x86 software company. And they had this directory services stuff figured out six or eight years ago. They've had a lot of time to think about that problem. I've also heard good things about ZenWorks, though I haven't touched it myself.
This could be very good indeed. I'm seriously thinking about downloading SuSE now; I know it's not going to change over the short term, but if the marriage comes off (and, mind you, MOST tech company takeovers fail), LinuxWorks could become the de facto standard within a few years.