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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.
Smithers: Mr. Hovsepian there's some solicitors at your door to see you.
Hovsepian: Release the employees.
i just got a mental picture of evil novel monkeys with wings being released......
I sure hope they're released under the GPL... It's good to see companies like this releasing human resources though. I'm going to download some today! Anyone got a torrent?
Pretty old news, it will be around 10% or 600 jobs
Ciao, Marcus
Wait a minute, are you saying we're FIRED?
I have such a hard time with this Newspeak.
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.
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.
Lets just say they've been "open sourced". 1160 people liberated, people want to be free.
But not me, I'm expensive.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I'd had a feeling that that story wasn't going to get posted here...
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
So it is true! There really are no women in IT!
I kid, I kid.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
SGI's are even cheaper....
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.
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.
Novell didn't "trip over its Linux strategy". Novell's primary product, Netware, was dead when Microsoft finally incorporated equivalent functionality into Windows. That's what the company "tripped over". Novell was essentially dead before they started doing anything with Linux. I find it amazing that they have managed to stay so relevant and important, and their acquisitions of SuSE and their support of Mono look like excellent ideas.
There is no way that their move into Linux was ever going to keep them going at their past levels. That's neither surprising, nor is it Linux's fault. You can make a decent business out of FOSS, but it's not going to be a cash cow like Windows or the old Novell.
I frankly can't judge whether Novell is executing right with SuSE. But the quality of SuSE as a distribution has been consistently high, and they have a good shot at selling to businesses, in particular in the European markets. I hope they'll make it, alongside RedHat and a completely free Debian; we need more and smaller companies, not a few behemoths. And, to me, the Linux distributions strike a good balance between compatibility and diversity.
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!
foreach NovellWorker Worker in CurrentlyHired {
if( Worker.TooOld || Worker.EarnsTooMuch || Worker.HatedByBobInAccounting ) {
Worker.Release();
Worker.Dispose();
}
}