Slashdot Mirror
Novell Under Pressure From Investors
UltimaGuy writes "The pressure is growing on Novell Inc's management to make major strategic changes after a regulatory filing revealed a Novell shareholder has joined Credit Suisse First Boston in calling for change at the identity management and Linux vendor. The steps proposed by the investment firm include cutting costs by targeting Novell's two corporate jets, its 'overstaffed' R&D department, legacy products, and its 400 NetWare engineers, as well as selling non-core businesses to enable funds to be redeployed."
I hope this doesn't harm the Mono project, which Novell has been a vital part of. I have great hope for this project. But I'm not sure how it helps Novell's bottom line, so it might be the kind of thing that goes on the chopping block.
I can't agree that Netware is completly at a dead end. To be sure it isn't a rapidly growing market but it isn't shrinking so fast either, the last time I met my Novell salesperson he said they still had over 400 Million Netware user licences under maintenance. Even if they lose 10% per year that still deserves heavy R&D.
Novell has a clear strategy here, with the latest Netware you can run either the Netware or SuSE kernel. My guess is that eventually Netware will ship with a Linux core by default but a number of people will continue to buy it for all the value add features. Within 5 years you will then see a single core O/S sold and you will then be able to buy services such as eDirectory, file and print management, Zenworks etc. as the value add profitable services.
Novell simply can't move out of Netware quickly, many infrastructure systems rely on it (I know of one airline booking systems and 2 cash machine networks in the Uk which still rely on it and I'm sure there are many, many more).
IBM made a huge mistake in abandoning OS/2 with nowhere for its customers (especially embedded system / POS customers) to move to. Novell has proved once again the value of their maintenance contracts by fully supporting all their existing OS customers until they have a smooth migration plan to SuSE.
I disagree. eDirectory and DirXML (Now called the Novell Identity Manager) are both very excellent products that fit in to places that many other products don't go. Especially DirXML.
On job I did a few years ago required synchronising a Mac OpenDirectory network with an Active Directory network. Getting the two to talk together natively was a mission and never gave us results that were worth the effort. Putting DirXML in between solved that problem. Adding eDirectory in to the equation allowed us to then add in products like their SAP based ERP services and several other applications. This provided for a very smooth, extremely easily managed service that went far beyond just synchronising their OpenDirectory and Active Directory networks.
I have not yet seen another platform like DirXML that is as slick and as easy to implement while at the same time supporting such a large number of products out fo the box. And its modular design makes it even easier for developers and solution providers to add support for their own products.
AD didn't kill Novell. Anyone that takes the time to seriously use eDirectory will understand that AD doesn't even begin to offer the same flexibility. Not to mention that AD is not cross platform where as eDirectory (and pretty much all their products) will run on Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, Netware, AIX... Oh, and that nasty Microsoft Windows product too.
Cutting costs to satisfy short term profit/cash flow to the detrement of long term profits is a management strategy called harvesting. It's usually a sign of a company in serious decline. Now you know where HP's heading.