Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Novell to Release 20% of Their Employees?

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the should-have-worked-for-the-oil-company dept.

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.

10 of 206 comments (clear)

  1. Act I by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Smithers: Mr. Hovsepian there's some solicitors at your door to see you.
    Hovsepian: Release the employees.

  2. released by specialkp · · Score: 5, Funny

    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?

  3. 600 people to be laid off by Marcus+Meissner · · Score: 5, Informative

    Pretty old news, it will be around 10% or 600 jobs
    Ciao, Marcus

  4. release... oh good, finally released... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Wait a minute, are you saying we're FIRED?

    I have such a hard time with this Newspeak.

  5. help me out here... by CDPatten · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:help me out here... by deanoaz · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.
    2. Re:help me out here... by Searaven · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I think you'd be surprised who uses Netware and it's services. I work for IDC, International Data Corporation. We use Netware and Suse in most of the 47 countries we have offices in. I used to work in the corporate headquarters in the US where we have Netware 5.x and 6.x file/print/services servers in all the offices. They mostly run for over a year or more between reboots. Those are usually for service packs and rarely for abends. Netware/eDirectory is very low on the scale of adminstrative burden and it allows us to manage the network and desktops for 750+ users in 7 offices across the States with only 2 full time desktop support staff and 2 admins who also take care of many other systems. Most of our sites with 10 to 50 people don't have a local admin and run quite happily. Novell's ZenWorks is phenomenal for remote application delivery, imaging, remote control and inventory for the desktop. I moved to Australia in May to bring IDC AP over to Novell services, running on the Linux kernel with OES. It's a slow process getting the entire region ready for the change. So far I have our New Zealand office migrated and the Sydney office is very soon to follow and some of our services in Australia are already on Netware. Since I got here I've had to manage two Windows domains and though I started with NT domains many years ago I feel like I've got an arm tied behind my back administering the Windows networks, services and users. Things that are so painless with Netware are either difficult or not possible with NT domains. I've been so spoiled with Netware I can't wait to be rid of the domains! Active Directory is better than NT, but from what I've seen (it's in a few of our offices over here), it's not nearly as fully featured as the far more mature Novell eDirectory product. Our current Netware sites will gradually migrates to Open Enterprise Server runnin on the SLES Linux kernel and many of our core services are running on Linux. If it wasn't for vendors who only roll out applications only for Windows machines - Patchlink, ePo, etc, we wouldn't have any Windows servers. I agree with an earlier post that Novell's marketing efforts have always been their downfall. It's too bad really, because it is such a superior product to choice of the huddled masses.

  6. Released... by ch-chuck · · Score: 5, Funny

    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); }
  7. Yesterday... by Otter · · Score: 5, Interesting
    In the Boston Globe yesterday: "Novell trips over its Linux strategy".

    I'd had a feeling that that story wasn't going to get posted here...

    --
    What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
  8. Re:Support _only_ KDE and SUSE by Chapter80 · · Score: 5, Informative
    Novel's stock will only go up if they start being profitable.

    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.