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.

Comments

I don't doubt NetWare revenue continues to slip.

[hal2814]

I worked at a University campus for a while where we used NetWare extensively. When I started there, Novell folks thought the world of NetWare. By the time I left, there were some serious concerns among the NetWare crowd. NWAdmin was being phased out by ConsoleOne (which is fine) but then the Wed-based manager (forget the name) came in and they claimed they were phasing out ConsoleOne. ConsoleOne was only a year or so old! At that time, we had to run three different admin frontends because each had their own quirks and were incompatible with some stuff. Their NetMail system was a bit of a disappointment performance-wise (but not feature-wise). It took them a LONG time to work out some serious kinks in IFolder (like changing the default directory of the local folder). There's also the problem that NetWare != Novell. A lot of the more popular pieces of Novell's lineup (GroupWise, ZenWorks, NetMail) can be run from a Windows server over Active Directory now.

Lol, stockholders

[jayhawk88]

"...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.

Novell is the next big takeover target

[DiamondGeezer]

It has great products, but a lousy, overbureaucratized management structure with lots and lots of layers of people whose sole functions are to shaft the people below them and survive the next purge by the people above. This makes for a fanatically strong political system, with lots and lots of people looking over their shoulders instead of looking forward.

It is also centrally managed, Soviet-style, complete with multi-year plans and targets and Novell employees are regularly gathered together to compliment their leader for the overperformance on this meaningless metric, and the achievement of "difficult" targets in the teeth of a bitter competitive wind. As is usual in command enterprises, everywhere else other than Provo is treated as a satellite state. Only from Provo do all the ideas come, so if you're bright and have a great idea and don't work in Provo, don't bother telling anyone about it because they don't want to know. And if you persist they'll park you in a shitty job until you get the message and leave. Lots did.

There should be a sign on all offices "Abandon initiative all ye who enter here". They have lots of meetings whose purpose is to crush all ideas from below and praise the crappy ones from above. Rebranding, corporate restructuring, departmental changes, layering, delayering, change management etc are regular 3-6 month occurences. During my five years there, I moved desks 16 times. Eventually you don't bother emptying boxes into your drawers because you know that another org change is just around the corner. The people adminsitering these changes never moved. It was uncanny.

Initiatives come thick and fast from above and your only choices are to keep your mouth shut or be drowned in the slurry. At one time, everyone in Novell went through the Kepner-Trego rational decision making course, complete with little cards and posters on the wall and papers for people to do rational decisions on. The only problem with that, is in order for rational decision making, there must be rational decision makers, which in Novell is a joke. One month after the course nobody mentioned, let alone used, Kepner-Trego again.

Then Novell merged with Cambridge Consulting (or was it Cambridge Consulting reversed into Novell?) Cambridge weren't doing very well. Novell weren't doing very well - the result would be a world-beater? Like to guess?

Cambridge added a lot more consultants that Novell didn't need. In order to employ those extra consultants, Novell did the most obvious thing: it screwed its partners. So the partners who had done such sterling work promoting the Novell brand found that Novell itself was competing for those same customers to order to employ those extra consultants that Novell didn't need.

With all of this could Novell make a profit through its Consulting arm? No. It charged twice as much and still managed to lose money because most of the time, it pitched for delivery times that were too short and had to use up all of the profit and then some to pay its consultants past the end date in order to deliver at all. Thus Novell managed to screw its partners and fail to make a profit. The perfect result for its competitors. One customer I consulted for that after their experience, they would never use Novell Consulting again (this was one of the largest privately-held companies on the planet).

Novell joined the Linux field too late and bought the wrong company (should have been Red Hat). It bought SilverStream for too much money. It's been behind the curve for lots of new products too often.

It's testing and quality of software are terrible. More often than not, products would be shipped with key pieces of functionality missing pending the first or second service pack. The software would work, but you had to wait to be able to deploy it meaningfully.

Novell should be bought by somebody who knows how to run an enterprise for profit. Instead its run by people who know only how to cover their own asses and rule by fear. I guarantee you, any turnaround specialist would perform a decapitation of Novell's byzantine management structure to stand any chance.

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