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."

Comments

Sun Could Possibly Buy Novell?

[jg21]

Maybe there's truth in the notion then that Sun might buy Novell. If it doesn't buy Red Hat first, as Mark Hinkle here seems to think it might.

Cut through the BS

[bigtallmofo]

targeting Novell's two corporate jets, its "overstaffed" R&D department

I wonder by cutting its overstaffed R&D department if they really just mean move them all to China?

I guess the execs will need those corporate jets to fly back and forth to China in style so they can visit their lower-paid works occasionally.

The slashdot angle

[bfree]

From the article (emphasis mine):

The investment firm (Blum) has also called on Novell to increase its investment in Linux and open source software through partnerships and acquisitions to move "further up the stack".

Blum's proposal is broadly similar to CSFB analyst Jason Maynard's suggestion that Novell should focus on software services rather than consulting, increase its emphasis on open source software, and repurchase company stock

So at least the pressue isn't on for them to dump Suse/Linux which was my initial fear on reading the slashdot post. In fact if anything they aree being encouraged to place more focus on it showing even these (presumably) hardened business types can finally see the long term value in FOSS.

Abend Condition: Private Jet Has Been Shut Down.

[ScentCone]

Just yesterday I was cycling through the KVM on a rack of machines in a server room, and one of the boxes, apparently untouched for over 3 three years, had puked just that morning (on a RAM hiccup, or something similar), and did the old Novell equivalent of a BSD. The funny thing (other than the timing) was that no one with any interest in the infrastructure could come up with the slightest idea what that machine was actually supposed to be doing. Right now the plan is to leave it off until some dev guy screams (or, payroll doesn't go through, or another equally dramatic land-mine type event).

But the point is, that machine would appear to have gone from Important To Somebody Who Really Liked Novell to, well, Complete Obscurity in a pretty short time. Not entirely representative of Novell's current corporate state of affairs, but in retrospect, the whole thing was sort of poetic. Plus, the users in question are now about to pay for an audit of what the hell actually is running in their server room.

Re:400 NetWare engineers??

[bonius_rex]

Why so many guys are still working on a dead-end product with no future is beyond me.

I think Novell is in a hard spot wrt Netware. I admin about 50 Netware servers. *I* know that I can do everything I need on Open Enterprise Server. There is no technical reason to carry on with Netware, but convincing my higher-ups that Linux is no longer "just some hippie hobby thing" takes time.

I'm afraid that if Novell were to discontinue support for Netware today, my management might decide it would be just as easy to migrate to Windows as to OES.

Novell has to keep Netware support rolling along, while at the same time convincing PHBs (like mine) that Linux is perfectly acceptable for large scale mission critical deployments. Dropping a significant number of Netware engineers could cause Novell to lose customers if they are not very careful.