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Novell's Race Against Time
DiamondGeezer writes "The Guardian newspaper in the UK reports in 'It's a race against time' that Novell is on a knife-edge financially and competitively, having placed a huge one-way bet in the success of its Linux strategy. But there's no guarantee of success: its revenue from Linux licensing is puny, and it faces a crowded market of Linux distros. Novell may be getting some positive press now that it's gone full tilt for Linux, but let's remember the reasons why: because of mis-steps of its previous management (especially the disastrous acquisition of WordPerfect in the mid 1990s) and its failure to grow its Netware business (with more than a little help from Microsoft), it's now having to re-engineer itself for Linux."
Is Novell deserving of the support that the Open Source Software (OSS) community can provide to increase the odds of success regarding its Linux push?
If so, what can the average Linux user do to help (besides switching to Novell Linux Desktop (NLD) or becoming a shill?)
If not, why not?
How does Novell expect to remain competitive in the world of free linux. Especially with RedHat dominating the paid business sector.
They were one of the pioneers of many technologies available today. It will be sad to watch their slow painful death.
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NoVA Underground: Where Northern Virginia comes out to play
What Novell really needs to do is merge unique features from Netware into Linux, and license much of Apple's proprietary code at any price. This will allow applications made for the Mac to compile and run pretty cleanly on Novell Linux, thereby differentiating Novell from the other distros.
Netware didn't just fail "with more than a little help from Microsoft". It failed because (and it kills me to say this), Windows NT was a better product than Netware in just about any way imaginable. I remember when I made the switch in my career from Netware to NT. I can't think of anything that Netware did better than Windows NT. Netware pretty much sucked ass...
I must admit that it was very early in my IT career that I made this switch. Perhaps my inexperience in Netware had something to do with my opinion of it.
Last post before the dreaded Slashdot April Fools articles are submitted.
I've been thinking for a while, from just before the start of the SCO vs IBM circus, that Novell is getting ripe for being bought out by IBM. Anyone else concurr?
The biggest problem Novell has is attracting the best and brightest software engineers. This is because a lot of Novell engineering is done in Provo Utah. Life in Provo is not for everyone. It is beautiful but it is one of those one company towns. If your job there does not work out then you'll have to relocate for your next job. The cost of living in Silicon Valley is high but a great engineer can find a new high paying job within a matter of days. Provo does not offer that.
While I can't argue much against that statement, I really wish it hadn't been disastrous. WordPerfect has always been my favorite word processing suite, and I wish Novell still owned it, and would give better Linux support than the wishy-washy stuff Corel's been doing.
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Novell may be facing competition with a lot of other distributions, but I have to say that I don't see Suse fading anytime soon. In fact, in my experience, Suse has been getting more popular as of late. It certainly seems like the most well refined distribution I've used lately. Redhat seems to have left a bad taste in the mouths of a lot of Linux users, and I've never heard of anyone using Mandrake on a server, which really leaves Suse as the last of the major distributions with commercial backing (I know there are other commercial Linux distributions, but when I think of commercial Linux distributions, I always think of the big 3 as Suse, Redhat and Mandrake).
YaST is probably one of the best system tools I've used on any Linux distribution, and hopefully we will see some really great things once we see some (forgive the buzz word) synergy between Suse and Ximian.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
Is it sad that I miss my old, university ginormous NDS tree? Everywhere I do, it's Active Directory, which appears to have almost caught up to where Novell was in 1994.
This crazy world makes no sense.
dinner: it's what's for beer
I don't recall hearing that Novell ever intended to make a lot of money by selling a Linux distro. On the other hand, converting their existing products to Linux will save them a bundle compared to developing a completely independent solution. Most of what their stuff does is the same as what Linux does. They can concentrate on the things that make them different to add value.
I bought Novell shares around the time they announced their acquisition of SuSE. At that time, Novell was shifting its strategy into aggressively supporting opensource projects (SuSE, Mono, KDE, etc). Ever since then, their stock has been going in a downward spiral. I guess this is what happens when you support a company based on what you believe in rathar than what actually sells. Sad.
I, for one, hope Novell makes a go of it, but the world is unfortunately a harsh place.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Maybe Novell should also license from IBM all it can from Lotus SmartSuite, then merge the best of WP, Paradox, (if it still has any rights to WP & Pdx) into SmartSuite and then release the package to compete with OpenOffiice.org.
I am STILL not pleased with the document insert "feature" which, when I insert a document, it goes into a "band", invisibly. When I link to another document and then want to edit from beginning to end, I damn well should be able to SEEEEEEE those linked documents.
Lotus WordPro has done this RIGHT for years. 1.9.79 still makes me go, "sigh.... maybe NEXT version SO/OO.o will pull their heads out and actually BUY a copy of Lotus SmartSuite and start simplyfiying and mimicking stuff that works, instead of coming up with gee-whizz stuff that piles on to the list of features that have to be debugged, making it too resource intensive (on the devs AND the desktop) to be economical to go back and fix those useful features.
I also think Novell could pull a rabbit or two by adjusting the document interface so that a user in a spreadsheet can put the tabs wherever they want, not just get force-fed bottom tabs only or top tabs only. (Actually, I thought GroupWise offered that, or maybe it was QuattroPro...)
If IBM and Novell had some limited thing going on, Lotus SmartSuite could be diffused (not DEfused, mind you) across more Linux/Open Source environments.
I am not at all about "killing off" the various suites that OpenSource devs are making, but christ-o-matic, take a LOOK at what SmartSuite has, and gingerly, without ticking IBM off too terribly, clone some of those features, especially if IBM is not going to get its Lotus camp on the band wagon.
NOVELL, are you leesteneeng? Please, PLEASE, license from IBM/Lotus the Lotus and then uppgrade the Approach database interface, the Lotus WordPro document interface, and the Lotus 1-2-3 interface. They're crisp, tight, concise, colorful, not drab/gray.
At least Lotus isn't busy chomping away and cloning the heck out of ms' orifice. (Actually between Lotus and SourceNext ("Lotus SuperOffce developers/distributors in Japan/Asia...), I wonder what will be the next offerings to Lotus SmartSuite.)
David Syes
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Netware was very stable, and very easy to manage from a sysadmin perspective. Especially pre-Netware 5. In my experience, it was a robust networking and directory services package that enabled Windows to work (relatively) seamlessly better than Windows could do it. That's the caveat though, Microsoft's networking schema evolved and Windows NT 4 especially was the beginning of the end for Novell's flagship product. Once Windows could natively do what you previously needed a "Client" to do it was pretty much over. Microsoft's transition to TCP/IP was much smoother than Novell's away from IPX/SPX I miss Zenworks and the Novell Application Launcher that could be used as an explorer/program manager replacement, making deployment and managing a ton of computers easy. LANDesk is a lackluster replacement, IMO. Active Directory on the other hand is shaping up to be a very nice way to manage a bunch of computers, mix with Ghost and LANDesk, its almost the same as the old Netware suite. I think this is where Novell could make a real in-roads with Linux. If Novell is successful in combining Linux seamlessly (no "client" needed, automatic domain/tree login with user rights, shares, printers...etc) with the GUI administration tools of Netware, I think they'd have something marketable. Unfortuantely, RedHat's nearly beaten them to the punch. I think Novell is a lot like Netscape. Brand recognition is still there and Novell still has a decent reputation for solid products though the market share has decreased a thousand-fold. If they can bring something to the table that can be deployed easily, with out having to go through lengthy conversion and training processes for the people who have to deploy and manage it, Novell might just garner a bit more attention. Its not a last ditch effort, but its damn close.
I know what you're thinking. Did I forward 65,535 packets or 65,536 packets?
We have a fairly sizeable eDirectory tree of about 100,000 users. We have hundreds of Netware servers. We use Identity Manager(dirxml) extensively. Our entire LDAP authentication runs on eDirectory. I know many other VERY large companies such as ours where Novell plays a very important role and where eDirectory is the central authentication/idenitity scheme. Sure we have some Windows application servers---who doesnt. But I always get amazed at those who predict the death of Novell---because usually those are the same people who have never used any Novell products in their life. Believe me Novell is dominate in every Fortune 100 company out there. They are going nowhere.
At the moment in my place of employment, we want to run Debian on some custom hardware (but alas, Debian won't work on it - despite many hack attempts), because we just find RPMs too hard to manage and apt-get + aptitude to ge great.
Employing someone to waste time trying to install Debian on something which cannot guarantee a pay off is not fun, and is a waste of money as well for the customer.
The thing is, the hardware vendor doesn't take Debian seriously (because it's not backed by a company with resources), so there is no driver disk or hardware support.
What I am trying to say is this:- there is a niche here that needs to be filled. There is a need for companies with the ability to back Linux distros, even if just for customer peace of mind. They will pay money for it. So far, only RedHat is being taken seriously commercially IMHO.
There is no "swamped" Linux market, or at least, not in my situation as far as I can tell. Only blimmin' RedHat Linux is supported and will install on our blade server.....
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Novel vs Redhat. In a corporate environment with directory services novel wins hands down. Novel (suse) also has a much much better QA procedure on its Enterprise linux products. I have not seen to date one issue to date (yet) that has caused systems to go down after patches have been applied. However with redhat we see it all the time.
For anyone serious about an enterprise level linux novel is the only real choice.
While I don't doubt that Novell has taken a large risk with playing "the linux card", I don't see them in any immediate danger of financial difficulty.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=NOVL&annual
While their installed base is certainly not what it once was, they have a solid reputation, still significant installed base, and from what I remember, a decent size pile of cash (771,844 at last quarterly report) to fall back on.
In other words, exactly where SCO might have been if they had not made a different sort of bet. (i.e. running a business of making products, selling support and consulting services, etc. Not to start an SCO love fest, but once upon a time they were a well regarded company).
Was not about Wordperfect. It was about Groupwise. Novell still makes a huge amount of money on Groupwise, the WP deal was very much a win for them.
Firstly, this fails to take into account the recent Microsoft settlement which brought $536 million into Novell, plus the additional cash they have on hand. They aren't suddenly going into bankruptcy.
Second:
"it is getting excited about the version of KDE that will accompany SuSE Linux 10 next year. This is based on Mono, another Novell takeover, which aims to provide a development environment that will run Java and Microsoft.net on Linux"
KDE has nothing to do with Mono. The author probably meant Ximian Gnome, but that doesn't even make the statement true, and wtf does Mono have to do with Java?
SuSE + Ximian + Mono + Novell = Good prospects in my book. Granted Novell management has a long history of screwing things up, but this product line looks pretty promising. In fact, full disclosure I put my money where my mouth is and purchased some amount of Novell stock.
The more you know, the less you understand.
I might be talking out of my @ss, but the last few days I've been thinking that innovation and customer service have taken a rather bad beating by IP and patent infringement litigation.
If Novell really wants to do something besides take a dive in front of the world, they should take the talent that they do have, add a bit to it, and (as someone else almost stated) create a Linux distro that is not like the rest. A Linux that 'makes it easy' to put it anywhere in your network, run just about _anyone's_ applications, and has simple to use but well behaved patch management and update services.
They could also ship low cost versions of their distro that are tailored for specific applications such DVR, home-based firewall/proxy/mail_filter/u-name-it, game machine, etc...
I kind of hate to say this, but if my aunt Julie got a Novell CD in the mail, and it installed perfectly for her, let her get all her normal home user applications running with ease, they would increase their customer base.
All of the home users that I know of don't want to mess around with the OS on their $500 'Dude, your getting a whaaaa?' machines. They just want to turn it on, get their email, be able to figure out how to easily use their digital cameras, and do cool stuff on the Internet that they hear about from friends and neighbors.
If Novell really wants to be a 'playa' they need to make a user experience that beats windoze and AOhelL for ease of use, ease of adding features, and ease of keeping it secure from spam, spim, virii, and other malicious forms of those 'I don't know what it was, but now my computer doesn't seem to work very good' problems.
IMHO any OS that can build a 'tune-up' kit that my aunt Julie can use will be a bear in the marketplace.
Its not good enough to have a good OS, your product has to be part of a service, and it *MUST* be innovative and include the kind of customer service that people *WANT* to pay money for.
Yeah, I hack together my own machines, and for the most part I enjoy it... but I'm rare... the majority of people just want a computer that works when they turn it on... like their stereo or microwave oven.
They also want to do 'cool' stuff without having to be an MIT graduate (not that being a MIT graduate guarantees that you know how to do _anything_).
Well, the reason that RedHat got its customer base is because they more-or-less did these things for the corporate environment. With what is happening on the home desktop, SPAM litigation, the UN wanting to control the Internet... its all too much, the aunt Julie's of the world just want it to work as reliable as their toaster, and without the need of knowing someone in the neighborhood who is a computer genius.
If Novell can do that, they *WILL* garner sizable market share.... IMO.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
$4.99 novell linux dvd at checkout counter :
best buy ? nope.
frys ? nope.
barnes and noble ? nope.
office depot ? nope.
clearly I am of the opinion that linux can move forward best and fastest via low cost, impulse buy at major retailers.
novell (or?) should attempt this.
One more item for thought: IBM is heavily invested in Novell. I can guarantee you, Novell is going nowhere but forward until/unless IBM gives up on Linux and Open Source technology -- and there's no evidence of this even remotely happening.
Until Microsoft proves it can compete on price and quality, instead of paid "studies" and fabricated "exposes" of competitors, readers would be best advised to avoid their products like the plague.
I was thinking about this the other day after watching the BrainShare video.
All the stuff that will actually increase sales is based on Suse (clustering, Xen, etc...).
Why didn't they try to buy Trolltech instead of Ximian.
I just don't see how Mono is going to help the bottom line in the near term.
Heck, I would've have bought Trolltech, and slapped some proprietary apps into Suse. There's got to be a competitive advantage somewhere, and I don't know how just services is going to give them that.
Suse was already pretty much a KDE distro, and buying Trolltech would have given them two things.
(1) The ability to change the Qt license to a more liberal one.
(2) Bring in the talent of Trolltech that is already accustomed to working with Suse.
KDE/QT still has a superior framework to Gnome/Gtk+, but frankly I see the Qt license being the one showstopper that will push Gnome/Gtk+ into the "standard" desktop category, once Linux on the desktop actually matters.
My FreeBSD 4.x boxes are over 1000+ days of uptime now with real load with real business logic running on them.
ROFL. Yeah, right, sure. And rocks fall upward, and the moon is made of green cheese...
I administered Novell and NT both back in the days you're talking about. Netware 3.x beat NT 3.x so badly, on every possible applicable point, not even the most incompetent admin would have ever made the claim you just did with a straight face.
Microsoft PAYED my employer a huge sum to partially replace our Netware server with an NT 3.5 server. That little netware server was keeping the office served so far as email, web gateway, and file and print serving without a problem. NT on a slightly faster machine proved itself incapable of handling the EMAIL ALONE for the same office, and this AFTER having guys from MS fly down to work on it every couple of weeks for six months.
On top of lack of functionality and lack of stability, it was also impossible to properly admin. It was a total POS and everyone knew it. Even the PHBs were totally upfront about it - they knew it was trash. But whenever we had a problem, MS cut a check (or something to the same end effect) to more than cover the losses.
That's how they won. Novel certainly made mistakes, but that doesn't change the fact that their product was vastly superior and defeated on grounds other than technical.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
I would argue that Sun has done more work then any other organization with regards to OpenOffice, it doesn't seem to have translated into a large amount of cash. On the other hand, Novell does have a history of some great network management products, the Directory services spring to mind and I personally have never heard anything bad about ZenWorks. Red Hat would have nothing comparable if Novell were to whip them out and make them what I remember of them. I always liked the NDS.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
It's nice to have been the first Network OS for PC's. The first guys to implement networks were invariably the biggest companies since they had the most to gain and the most resources to invest in a computer network. By default, they installed Netware. Fast forward 15-20 years and the bulk of these guys are still on Novell for authentication/directory services and probably file and print. Plus, since NDS works with anything, on many different platforms, there has been little reason for big co's to drop Novell - authentication to MS servers has been seemless for a long time.
Further, Novell is currently profitable and has a fat bank account. I think they'll have enough cash flow to finish any transition to Linux. With their brand name and history, they'll easily make SUSE the #2 Linux distro around (with a real shot at #1).
IMHO, what Novell could really use right now is a some really good integration of WINE into SUSE so that their new Server + Workstation bundles actually have a chance of being useful to the average company that has the odd Windows app that they need to run the business.
You know that if Novell goes down the tubes, some "industry experts" (read: shills writing for those magazines you get swamped with if you ever answer "IT Professional" on a survey) will surely blame Novell's involvement with Linux. A formerly big, profitable company dabbles in open source...and bites the dust. Therefore, open source is unprofitable. QED.
I had a lot of problems just getting it installed.
perhaps its just because im not the type to use the 'gui' approach to things, not that its a bad thing.
it either didnt have drivers for hardware that we needed to function, or had quirks with those drivers, or needed special treatment.
HOWEVER, that being said i installed it on a plain machine... and the installation was flawless.
I dont like yast, it was good for getting things to work, but I ended up in a console with a text editor editing configs anyhow.
the cups and samba portions in yast are just completely barebones.
the built-in kde conguration tool is far more powerful with regards to samba configuration than yast is.
I dont hate suse, it just didnt fit our needs, and upgrades failed way too easily. these machines we need, they are critical. I could not have a machine fail after an upgrade. after several of these failed upgrades i said enough is enough and switched the suse machines out with gentoo machines.
so, that why I switched it out.
it needs some more polishing, but granted some of my own personal preferences were trampled by it and thats part of it, for sure.
I will try it again in the future, I keep my eyes on most ditros, except for micro$oft linux. (redhat)
but between debian and gentoo and upgrading, I think its a tie. both do it very well, and with very little pain.
suse left me hanging more than once with a trashed system. either it didnt boot or it was really b0rked.
I say, give it a shot. it works fine as long as you dont have like bleeding edge hardware.
(like some sata controllers, ect)
All the comments on how Netware was so great make me laff. Read "In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters"
by Merrill R. Chapman, to get a good feel for why Netware went by the wayside. Its wasn't the 'suits' that killed them, it was the engineers. They had a bunch of egotisical engineers who refused to build what the market wanted. Yes, it is/was a fast stable file server. But thats about it. You couldn't really run apps on it. And when the clients of the world are all running Windows, and Netware is expensive and difficult to use with Windows, there you go.
As a former CNE I don't understand all the fuss about Novell. Their technology stopped providing value to companies and therefore stopped paying my bills long ago. Do any other former CNE's list that on their resume these days? Not me, there's no net gain from it. I always did like Novell, Gateway and others but time marches on.
Maybe you're right and maybe I'm just afraid (as a programmer) to see the superior KDE/Qt framework go into niche status eventually because of the Qt license.
Somewhat offtopic, but on irc today I heard that some guy that worked at Novell/Suse on KDE is moving on to work at Intel in their "Linux Desktop" division (whatever that means).
Having done some research on Novell about 6 months ago, there's some things that are not pointed out in the article that relate directly to cashflow.
It is true that their share of server sales has dwindled from a high of 80% down to low double digits. You can actually see that the impact of the introduction of WinNT. Over more recent years, the decline is actually due to Linux. What people frequently misunderstand is that this relates to NEW server sales.
What is not mentioned is the actual installed base. In this arena, Novell is huge. IIRC, a study that I saw put it at something like 3 to 5 million machines are running Netware.That's far more than all *nix combined, and was only matched by Windows.
Installed base == support/maintenance/upgrade revenue - ie services revenue. Novell has a cash cow there, that's for sure. Check out their 10Qs. And I should note that all their other 'businesses' - be it identity or ex Collabra or whatever are basically immaterial in comparison to their "software division formerly known as Netware".
But that revenue is still not sufficient. It was clear that if they didn't buy SUSE, they would lose their installed base to Linux for file/print services over time. And BTW, the Linux NEW server sales have been increasing rapidly. I always see that Linux is increasing at the expense of Windows and/or Unix, but never Novell. That is what surprised me most in my travels....
Obviously, migrating existing customers from Netware to Linux doesn't prevent leakage to either Windows or other Linux flavors, but now, they at least have a clear path for customers, and it will probably be the easiest path for their installed base.
Anways, that's my rant. And I wish Novell the best of luck. Successful linux companies will mean even better corporate acceptance.
So does Anonymous Coward have good karma?
Redhat is fine for servers (although I've had my share of problems with RHAS3, mainly NFS), but Novell offers something that RH has NEVER offered: out of the box Flash, Mpeg, Java, Real (yeah, I know - they're supposedly evil). These things are actually important for a desktop users. True, you could go out on your own and find all thiese things and install them yourself, but for a corporate "Give me a decent out-of-the-box desktop setup", Novell does nicely. And in my experience, Wireless as well as ACPI just work with MANY more laptops than RH.
The directory service is far superior (microsofts current incarnation of this is about where Novels was about '95) and this is an enourmous advantage in a large operation. Many large corporate networks are Novel for this reason already, so obviously if you're in one of those you need it for interoperability as well. You get greater stability, better performance (again, more important in a large operation where it may mean you can do the same job without buying as many servers) and it's a hell of a lot easier to administer properly.
With Novel into Linux now, you can expect it to continue to perform with less hassles in heterogenous environments as well.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
It's not just open source stupid!
... scalability, database size, license cost, standards based transactions and data handling...
And I say that with total humor.
I prefer to see more Novell in the marketshare whether it's open or closed source. Hopefully Linux users support will push them to open more technology like some companies have done, but overall Novell products are a lot better than there rivals. The eDirectory platform is better than Active Directory in many respects, including but not limited to security, cross-platform support (duh) and reliability
You get the picture.
If you were a Suse fan, stick in there. If you are a developer help out, open communication with Novell. Ignore the articles and push through the filter. Find situations where it works and implement it. I belive that eDirectory combined with what is now the Novell Linux Desktop will someday be a force to reckon with in the enterprise space.
If you've managed or designed a network you appreciate the technology Novell can offer you. I know many system administrators who would love to return to a day where the enterprise desktop isn't anything but an interface to work applications. I'd prefer a Linux desktop I could roll out with the features and security measures I want and be able to manage all the functionality at the server. It's the current Windows server sales pitch, but Novell's is better.
But then again, technology doesn't win in the board room. If it did Novell wouldn't be in a cash crunch now. But then again, I'm becoming a shill and ignoring some of the bad decisions Novell has made - either way, support them.
Taking on SCO would help their cause quite a bit as well...
Get your Unix fortune now!
I have put RHEL and Fedora on a number of boxes without problem. My company is about to put RHEL on about twenty thousand servers (no joke). So I have to call bullshit or amateur hour on you.
For Novell, I think the biggest challenge is to keep revenue stable while customers transition from NetWare to Linux, without losing too many customers to Windows in the process.
NetWare is still pretty expensive on the server. A 50-user copy is about $150 a seat on CDW retail ($7,500), about $50 a seat under a licensing agreement ($2,500).
SuSE is $999 per server with no client licenses fees.
Figuring NetWare to be about 50% of Novell's one billion in revenue, that means Novell would stand to lose more that 25% of their total revenue assuming everyone switched to SuSE. Novell might make this up with SuSE/Ximian desktop revenue, but I see large amounts of revenue from Linux on the desktop as being a long time in the making.
The estimates for SuSE revenue for 2003 were for about $40 million in revenue. As near as I can tell Ximan never really made any money to speak of.
So, if I haven't bored anyone to death yet, Novell NetWare is a $500 million revenue stream, SuSE is a $40 million revenue stream. Novell needs to very carefully transition from NetWare to SuSE if they want to keep revenue even. They can also grow by taking customers from Microsoft or Red Hat. But, it appears to me that Novell will have to shrink about 25% in size in order to remain profitable in the short term. Red Hat, with a more mature Linux strategy, only made $100 million in the last four quarters.
None of this is a bad thing, and I wish Novell the best of luck. I used to work there, and I still have friends there. Just doing the math though it seems like they will need to get smaller before they get bigger again.
'I am become Shiva, destroyer of worlds'
Novell made a bad bet. Red Hat owns business Linux, and let's face facts; paid Linux is a niche market. The main attraction of Linux is that it's free as in beer. When it's all said and done, SuSe would have been better off as an independant company.
From where I sit, Novell's aquisition was right on the money. redhat may have been more popular in the usa, but suse has always been a very solid distro, and always struck me as more solid and finished than redhat.
I have several business clients, all of who were red hat shops, and most of whom are now suse/novell shops. I don't see anybody moving in the other direction.
As for the main attraction of linux, free beer is absolutely irrelevant to the big boys I work with. They buy enterprise linux, and support contracts, and depend on linux to do the job with good performance, high reliability, and no hassles. suse/novell has been delivering, and with all the best of netware and edirectory available in a data center grade linux, I don't see them going anywhere but forward.
There is already a Novell certification for Linux, it's called the Novell Certified Linux Engineer (CLE).
The certification is adapted from a SuSE Linux certification programme, but with more LDAP/eDirectory and Netware/Linux interoperation coverage (e.g. hinting that they'll be skilled to migrate from Netware to Linux).
You might want to take a look at http://www.novell.com/training/certinfo/cle/ some time :)
Services.
If Novell turns into a huge Linux tech-support company, I bet they'll earn MILLIONS. Or maybe not, but think about it. It can become the #1 company in helping companies migrate to Linux.
Just think about it. With the increasing Linux market, they'll be VERY busy.
Setting up Samba? No problem. Recompiling the kernel? Our staff will go to you. Considering options between software? There we are.
"Novell. The Linux company."
But now, if Novell wants to survive SELLING SOFTWARE, then they should just forget about it. The FOSS is taking everything by storm - so they better adapt the service model (instead of the product model), or die.
Three demerits for smiley abuse.
If you have "Better things to worry about" , why did you post? Ahhh, I know, you actually don't have things to worry about. You don't Admin.
It's mandatory to wash your hands before returning to the land of Dairy Queen.
I think that the strongest product that novel has is SuSE. SuSE, unlike redhat, offers *FREE* security and bug updates, and allows you to easily mirror their update server with wget/ncftpget or whatever, and point your servers at an internal update host, for FREE, unlike redhat, which charges for RHN. This, paired with the fact that SuSE has the benefit of numerous third party certifications, like IBM, oracle, and mysql - it's a no brainer. I'm really surprised that more businesses didn't move over to suse instead of red hat enterprise. Great on desktops, by the way.
RandomAndInteresting.comdefending the world from stupidity since 1979
...if Novell is catering to destop users they have definetly found an untapped Linux market. My colleague is a Linux user/geek who gets a kick out of demonstrating to me (the only one of three OS.X users in the building who happens to have a desk near his) that his Linux laptop works just as well as my PowerBook. After trying a few distributions on three differnet laptops he finally settled on installing SUSE on an IBM box and then spent a week downloading software, tweaking the OS, flashing a whole range of firmware and opening up his IBM laptop a few times to muck around with the internals he finally announced: "See my LINUX laptop can do everything your PowerBook can!". Well of course it could. I never claimed Linux couldn't. My point, which he had once again missed completely, was that my PowerBook did all of those things from the time I took it out of the box and pressed the power button and the same applies to the Windows laptops the rest of the firm uses. That more or less sums up why people use Windows and OS.X. Things just work out of the box. and when it comes to my personal laptop workstation I simply do not have the time or the patience to spend a week or more trying to get everyting to work. If Novell can eventually deliver a Linux distro that enables me to install it on a laptop/desktop computer and just go to work without any further hassle I will use their distro whether irrespective of how evil they are supposed to be (they'll have a tough job out-eviling Microsoft anyway). And that concludes my rant.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Not to mention the fact that Novell's SUSE Linux server has about twice the performance of Windows Server 2003...
When you start running dozens or scores or hundreds of servers, that kind of performance difference starts to matter. Not to mention the license fees savings - but they are not as important as the ability to run half as many servers - which means fewer admins, less infrastructure costs, etc.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Agreed.
1 755222). Here's another interesting link http://www.linuxworld.com.au/index.php/id;16020781 22;fp;16;fpid;0
Being Novell they have street cred. Netware gives them a wedge into big businesses which no other Linux distro has. And I think they know and understand the businesses' needs better than any of the others, and have the tools to complement Linux to cater to those companies (Zen, identy management and such).
I think Novell and SUSE make a good fit. SUSE now has a desktop platform which they can work WITH, and not AGAINST.
They're clearly aware of it, and their CC EAL4+ certification was part of their plan, a certification which I think only SUSE still holds (among the Linux distros).
What the article could have mentioned is that Novell is proving to their customer that they can do without Windows, migrating internally to Linux desktops (see Joe Barr's http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/03/23/
Also (according to my common sense) 2400 could be written 2.4k or 2k4c, but they do not make any sense since they are actually harder to type :-)
NDS kicks the stuffing out of Active Directory Services also.
It's not obvious on small projects, but as you scale up you can see some pretty nice things on NDS.
eric
Not an urban legend. We (IT) lost track of a NetWare 3.x server used by a small (less than 100) department in a large (more than 20,000) entertainment company.
When it was time to upgrade the department's LAN from TokenRing to Ethernet, we couldn't locate this server. The clients had no idea where it was. They only knew that the all-important J: drive on their PC was there before they were.
It turns out that there used to be a janitor's closet behind shelves, and a large desk pushed up against the shelves, that no one in that department had ever remembered being opened. Certainly no one had the key for it. When it was finally opened, there was the 3.x, chugging away without a care in the world. I don't remember what the box was, but I doubt it held more than 16 megs of RAM.
By that time, the company had pretty gone the Microsoft route, and we were all weary of dealing with the christmas lights like nature of a WindowsNT based network. Needless to say, we were amused and more than a little impressed by this little-engine-that-could.
= 9J =
At first I was very pleased that Novell picked up SuSE. Since they had Ximian, now I thought that we would be getting a better product but I am very dissapointed with their handling of SuSE and linux in general. They may be doing the right things inside the Linux community but as a client who shells out cash for upgrades and distributions instead of downloading ISO's, I feel they are not upholding their end to me as a user very well.
My first problem is with support. Navigating around Novell's site trying to find a SuSE forum is painful and getting SuSE infomation is difficult at best. I find myself staying away from Novel and looking elsewhere. They need to seperate Novell's propriatary software from SuSE searches and set up a SuSE only support area with forums.
Next, I have a real problem with their custom setup for Apache. The documentation offered is the Apache Org docs for configuration which has nothing to do with what SuSE does. SuSE seperates the http.conf file into many many smaller files that are called from the main file. It is very difficult to navigate and remember which file something needs to go in. Apache consolidated their 3 setup files into one. SuSE does the oppsite and makes it a dozen or so files and then does not document it. I don't want to consult a map to figure out where a directive goes. This is dumb. Stick with the standards.
Next is my problem with Evolution and its support of Palm Pilot. They claim support but then do not supply conduits for the calendar or address book. Huh? Red Hat does, Mandrake does. SuSE owns Eximian and they don't. Really ignorant and frustrating.
Anyway, this indicates to me that there is some sort of breakdown at Novell with SuSE and Linux in general. They seem to not have figured out how to both serve the SuSE linux community and integrate this into their other offerings.
I love SuSE mainly for YaST and the workstation look and feel. But I am probably going to return to RH and Fedora because I just don't think Novell understands linux yet. They know they need it but they don't know what to do with it.
SUSE just needs to get corporate buyers to buy them instead of RedHat. There are only (2) distros that I would implement on a mission critical machine. Novell SUSE, and RHEL. Currently I use only RHEL, but I would be willing to consider SUSE.
Now for the zeolots, I'm not saying other distros can't be used on mission critical, I'm just saying without the corporate backing of a major player... (Oracle cert for RH, NetVault cert for RH, etc) Not on my database servers...
btw, I run Fedora FC3 also, just not on mission critical. I could use anything on those machines, but I choose Fedora because it supports the latest and greatest awhile still being pretty stable on most hardware and software functions. (Dell PowerEdge servers, and postfix, mysql, apache, etc)
Obviously, migrating existing customers from Netware to Linux doesn't prevent leakage to either Windows or other Linux flavors, but now, they at least have a clear path for customers, and it will probably be the easiest path for their installed base.
This path thing you talk about is very important. We're a mostly MS shop (lots of databases on MS) but 60-80% of our files services are on NetWare. We've been kicking around getting rid of NW over the last couple of years to simplify things for both our IT department and end users.
Our most recent decision to wait was directly Linux related. Our customers are asking more and more about running our products on Linux and we have a couple of test setups, but nothing major. Our CTO pointed out that IT would have to support this if we went whole hog in that direction and the absolute easiest path for IT to gain experience with Linux would be to migrate our NW servers into OES servers.
We're still on NW and we're moving very slowly on Linux, but NW will stay, for the moment, simply because we can see that migration path and want to have the option of traveling on it. In our case, the Linux-future at Novell is probably the most important difference between us staying a customer and not.
TW
When I try to explain to youngster network admins the wonders of NDS, their eyes just gloss over.
"Look," I tell them, "imagine one logical grouping for the History department. They can have History file server volumes scattered across multiple file servers, priters assigned to History, and users assigned to History who each can have his own personal drive mappings, History department drive mappings, and drive mappings inherited from Humanities, one level higher in the tree. Users or user groups from some completely different part of the NDS tree, say in ITdept, can then be given administrative rights over History. Or over Humanities, in which case that user will also have rights over History..."
At this point their eyes glaze over...
dinner: it's what's for beer
Novell has both a Certifified Linux Professional and Certified Linux Engineer certification. The CLE is a 2 hour exam and is a practicum exam. There are no questions on the exam, they give you a mutlti-server environment and you have to configure and install it based on specific guidelines given.
I had to take it twice and I have about 10 years of Linux experience with 7 of those being a Sr Linux admin for two companies.