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Novell to Release 20% of Their Employees?
sicariusdracus writes to tell us that Ron Hovsepian, the new president and COO of Novell may have his hands full in the near future. Ron has been tasked with getting the troubled business back on track which many have speculated could result in more than 20% of the 5,800 man workforce getting a pink slip (although Hovsepian suggests that may be an over exaggeration). Part of the restructuring will be announced with Novell's fourth-quarter financial results.
Pretty old news, it will be around 10% or 600 jobs
Ciao, Marcus
Lets just hope this has no effect on Mono. I'm amazed how far thay have come with the project. There are so meny sin-off projects now, it has to be taken seriously.
You don't see them because they are the servers in the the room that just keep working. :-)
Honestly, we have quite a few Netware servers for file/print. They just run and run great.
We are migrating away from them over time, but only because of support and marketshare. Too bad really.
Not quite Banyan Vines, but oh well.
It will be interesting to see if Netware services on top of Linux (OES) will allow Novell to keep their base happy. We're playing with it now.
We had some of our Netware 4 Servers run for over a year before they were rebooted, and that was for a move. We bounce our 5 and now 6 servers a bit more frequently, but that's for patch reasons, and it's almost always months between reboots.
TTYL
They are still big among enterprises that value reliability and ease of use for large directories. I work in local goverment and it is our central store of identity and authentication for 12,000 users, as well as distributing applications and hosting files. Netware 6.5 provides great resources for Identity Management. Many goverment and educational sites use Netware, maybe because they typically don't have a lot of money for staff and need something that isn't labor intensive or prone to failure.
We have never had server downtime because of a virus or worm.
Novell's marketing seems to be the only weakness, the products are great.
Their hope of the future is migrating all their existing features to run over Linux.
If 'the people' in Amendment 2 are 'the state' then Amendments 1, 2, 4, 9, and 10 benefit the state, not you.
It sells at 53 times next years earnings. That is more expensive than google. I can't think of any correct way to say that novl is cheap.
Red Carpet still exists. It's only been rebranded.
You're a suburbanite.
Err actually, the stock has been downgraded by several investment firms. Its expected drop a bit further even with the restructure. This will be like the 7th restructuring Novell has done in a little over a decade, if this doesn't pan out I don't think anyone will want their stock.
Regards,
Steve
To be clear, Novell is profitable.
EPS (ttm)=0.92 means that their Earnings Per Share for the Trailing Twelve Months was 92 cents a share. On a $7.47 share price (when I looked at the link, above), that's about 12% Earnings return on the share price (or a PE Ratio of 8.08).
That's really not a horrible return. Not great, but not bad, considering some tech companies LOSE money. It's only as high as it is because the stock price is beaten down so badly. Of course, you need to consider FUTURE earnings, not past, when buying a stock.
I'm no stock guru, but I do have what most would consider a sizeable portfolio, and I am in Novell at just over $6 (full disclosure here) for a few grand. So, yes, if I could encourage buying without touting the stock, I would. But I can't; that might be illegal.
I have done a migration from a Windows to Novell network at my company.
It has been wonderful. The servers are running SuSE Linux w/ Novell services & groupwise. I have seen virus attacks go to 0, security is better, the system is more responsive, easier to integrate with (eDirectory handles authentication for every in-house application we have, took about 15 minutes to code), and *much* more reliable.
My experience has been that Novell software is just incredibly capable. It. Just. Works. Even in the face of configuration problems, it all just keeps trucking along.
I could do a lot of what is available through Novell using openLdap, samba, cyrus, and so on. But I am one person supporting a staff of 150 AND writing custom software. Novell + Linux lets me do this and keep the system administrator job down to about 5 hours per month not including supporting these damned windows workstations.
Rebranded //and// extended. ZLM7 is much improved over Red Carpet Enterprise 2 and the first releases of ZENworks Linux Management.
I know you (maw) know this - just posting for the slashdot record. :)
Evil ZEN Scientist