Slashdot Mirror
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.
So after the 4th quarter results are in, that would be a good time to buy Novell stocks? $7/share is pretty tempting...
All joking aside, who uses them anymore? Is their business all legacy support?
Do any of you guys use them? I guess I ask because I'm surprised they are still in business.
I hanve't seen a novell system in many years, and never hear about copanies doing a big novell roll-out.
I'd had a feeling that that story wasn't going to get posted here...
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Yes $7/share is pretty tempting, but Novel's stock will only go up if they start being profitable. Novel had it coming to them when they bought Ximian, a gnome vendor that made a hodge podge of different products that are now dead (remember RedCarpet?). Novel should stick to SUSE/KDE and re-orient all its developers towards improving _only one_ application for each particular need (ie. YAST for installation/maintenance, KDE for desktop, etc).
Novel's premier Linux distribution, SUSE, is historically based on KDE yet the individual projects that they're supporting (Beagle, Evolution) are gnome apps. I think in the long run KDE will become the de-facto standard primarily because of the tight integration among its applications and excitement in its developer and user base about KDE 4. If you don't believe me, take a look at how many more posts there are in KDE-Look than in Gnome-Look. In fact, there is KDE-Apps for independent apps built with the KDE/QT framework, while there is no such place to aggregate gnome apps.
In conclusion, Novel should get their gnome developers to work on KDE so that they have a tightly integrated system with no duplicated functionality.
Didn't the New Zealand government just announce a big partnership with Novel? How are they reacting to all this negative news coming out of the company?
Novell's old products are great. But their sales force sucks beyond belief. They are one of the few companies where you have to defeat their sales force to get them to sell you anything.
And you had better know exactly what you want because they're not going to offer any advice.
The only time you'll see/hear a Novell rep is when a tech support company goes cruising for clients. The Novell reps love to be driven around to see customers that they wouldn't ever call on their own.
I could double Novell's sales with nothing more than a two line phone and an email account. Seriously. Microsoft takes executives from potential clients to expensive dinners. Novell won't even waste a phone call on an existing customer. They won't even let you know when new products come out that could fit with the stuff they have on record that they sold you.
Jack Messman says Novell now has two primary businesses: identity management and open source. That's the business Novell wants to go after, anyway. I think it has a decent amount of what you call legacy-support business as well, but it's constantly shrinking.
Identity management is a pretty hot area right now and a lot of companies want a piece of it, including the big guys like IBM and Sun. Novell remains a leader, however, largely because it has a superior directory product.
I wrote an article profiling Novell and it's current business prospects last year. It still pretty much holds. Try to look past the fact that it quotes Laura DiDio -- before joining the ranks of the "notorious foes of Linux," she covered Novell for years and years.
The latest news is that Novell's shareholders have been pressuring it to focus more and more on Linux and open source. I'm not sure that's necessarily the best move, because I don't think Suse Linux is generating all that much revenue so far. The open source angle seems to be perceived as the "sexiest" way to go forward, however, with the hope of reviving the Novell brand.
Breakfast served all day!
One has got to believe that Novell will not remain an independent company for long. How long before CA, the grim reaper of IT, will acquire them, fire the remaining 80% and suck the legacy customers dry for maintenance revenue at inflated rates until they finally are fed to Microsoft? You heard it here first. Gartner analysts? - here's a new idea for you to pitch now that CA is your best buddy... (read the Ilumin acquisition press releases...) CA has always wanted an operating system anyway.... Cheers. -blacknerd
I don't think Novell is going to have much in the way of difficulty capturing mindshare among the OSS and Linux user community. There is a few things they need to do (a better Yast, small utilities like service and slocate, etc) but the general feel of Suse 10 is that it is fairly well along to being rock solid itself. The momentum is building, and many of the community that once despised SUSe for releasing their product as source only, now feel that way about Red Hat.
Enterprise managers, however, are a different proposition. Red Hat is the linux "brand name"., and Red Hat legitimately earned that title with their tireless work over the past years. They were the major reason Linux is a serious contender in the industry.
However, Red Hat is coasting on thier reputation, and, outside of that reputation , the competition between Novell and Red Hat is pretty much even. Neither side has serious mindshare among the enterprise managers, who are mostly just experimenting at this stage.
Red Hat will have a lot of serious enterprise implementations to point to soon, they are in a number of companies. However, that won't be convincing to your average manager, since they will see it as one off successes, not a validation.
The deal maker will be a reference implementation, that managers can see as as something they customize, rather than create. Neither side has that yet, though Novell seems much better situated to deliver it.
It isn't simply the wider or more bleeding edge scope of SUSe10 versus RHEL4, it also Novelles Identity Management solutions. Identity Management is at the heart of most major enterprise projects today, and Novell is the "Red Hat" of that industry (rock solid, boring, unadventurous). Identity Management is something that enterprise managers can relate to on their ROI scorecard, unlike OS's, which CFO's don't understand or care about.
So, to summarise, Novell needs to create a reference Enterprise Application, complete with an openly availble (a la Oracle) though not necessarily open source, Identity Management suite, and start demoing that to enterprise managers. Combined with pressure from the techie side, it should be enough to give Novell at least a fighting chance in dominating this still nascent industry niche. In true OSS fashion, they can do it by making alliances with a number of the smaller consulting organizations that have good track records and reputations in these sort of enterprise applications.