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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?
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?
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, for one, hope Novell makes a go of it, but the world is unfortunately a harsh place.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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.
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.
Not just sad - it will set a very dangerous precedent for all Linux corporate offerings in the future!
Think - Novell, one of the largest networking software companies, having the final nail in the coffin being hammered in by choosing Linux.
How would that statement sound in the mind of a PHB? "Linux = doomed software companies" is a particularly nasty association when making a platform decision (even though going with Linux was probably the right solution, rather than continuing with NetWare.)
I don't know if they can pull out of the slump, but we should support Novell any way we can, as it stands as one of the largest allies Linux (and the OSS community) has today. To see Novell's downfall will definitely weaken Linux's corporate desktop offering.
What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex!
Novell's added value is in the products that run on top of Linux. Few people realize how powerful Novell's suite is. When it comes to managing a large scale PC network, there are few tools finer than eDirectory and ZENWorks.
A few years ago I worked on a worldwide directory services project, and the suits brought the notorious Microsoft shill Gartner onboard. Only one of the partner companies involved (out of almost 40) was a Novell shop. What platform did they suggest? eDirectory. After using AD, eDirectory and OpenLDAP in varying implementations I can vouch for the power and effectiveness of the Novell tools.
ZENworks is a best of breed desktop management suite. Throw than on top of Novell's file and print tools. Add in the clustering support. The web based management tools. The handful of open source tools(Apache, PHP, MySQL, rsync) that now come with Netware. Taken together it's a very powerful, very valuable package. I can support more PC's using less staff with Netware than any other OS.
Now what sucks about Netware? Lack of developers. Every time I sit in a meeting, some asshole wants me to add yet another W2K3/SQL box for their product. Given Netware's market share I can't blame them. No-one is ever going to write another NLM.
OES on SuSE changes everything. You get all of the Novell tools, all of the open source tools, a worldwide developer base, plus the goodies from Ximian. It's a huge win. Not only do I get Linux, from the servers to the desktop, but I get the tools to manage every box.
It's not too late. The better tools can still win, but only if people knee deep in Microsoft solutions will bother looking at them.
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 large majority of the company's engineering is still in Utah, despite the addition of a couple hundred Linux engineers outside of Utah in the two acquisitions. The new HQ (in Waltham, MA) is more for the corporate types.
IAAL,BIANLY
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'
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/