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Novell Layoffs Coming This Month?
Roblimo writes "Multiple sources close to and inside Novell have told us the company expects to lay off between 10% and 15% of all employees by the end of October. '...shareholders have suggested that Novell divest itself of its consulting group and GroupWise division, while at the same time instituting personnel cuts across the board to bring expenses more in line with revenues,' writes business columnist Lauren Rudd at NewsForge, who also notes that '[Novell's] NetWare revenue stream continues to deteriorate, declining by $36 million in fiscal 2004, excluding the impact of favorable foreign exchange rates.'" NewsForge is part of the same family of companies as Slashdot.
Novell has all the components of a solid business, just not the vision. Just look at their homepage - does it tell you who they are or what they have planned for the future?
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
"...shareholders have suggested that Novell divest itself of its consulting group and GroupWise division..."
In other news, shareholders have also suggested that Microsoft needs to dump Office, and Apple should just stop with the iPod thing already.
You know, eDirectory is nice and all, but I promise you there are more than a few Netware shops out there who continue to be Netware shops primarly because of Groupwise.
When I spoke with a salesmen about becoming a potential reseller/OEM of Suse, the salesman I was speaking with said "If you're only going to sell 2 or 3 licenses a month it's not worth my time. We want large deployments." He said that about 5 times in a 15 minute conversation.
I might not be a $1mil/mth salesman, but I can tell you from a purchaser's perspective it doesn't matter how much or how little you sell, being told @#$% like that really just flat out ticks a person off. The specific job I was bidding on would have been 50 desktop licenses and 2 servers, but because of that kind of comments that were repeatedly said to me...well, Redhat won the contract instead of Suse.
I've never really been impressed with Suse in the first place, but the customer had heard good things about it and wanted to go that direction to replace MS desktops and Novell servers in their business. After explaining the situation I had run into with the Suse sale tactics, they decided to follow my previous suggestion. So not only did they lose a customer that had specifically requested it, they lost a company that would have been selling their products and promoting it.
So yeah, doing B.S. like that is going to hurt the bottom line and one can only hope that the salesman I spoke with is one that ends up on the unemployment line. Granted, it would take ALOT more than that to make me consider Suse again simply because that guy should NEVER have been allowed to be talking to the public about buying products.