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Novell, Dell Face Delisting From NASDAQ
narramissic writes to tell us that Novell has confirmed receiving a delisting notice from the NASDAQ stock exchange, after the software company delayed filing its most recent quarterly report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Dell is in the same position. Both companies, and others including Apple, are grappling with investigations of the way they issued stock options and — in Dell's case — other accounting irregularities. Both companies are appealing the delisting, which means they won't vanish from the stock exchange anytime soon. NASDAQ rules require listed companies to announce the receipt of a delisting notice.
You'd be surprised. I work for a software company that currently supports software that's been in the field for 20 over years (between acquisitions and people refusing to upgrade). I would say easily, more than 30% of the clients I work with still deal in a Novell Environment. This is analagous to those clients that are still in Windows 95 (and quite often are one and the same). If it ain't broke, why fix it?
that can get mired down any number of ways.
they bought SuSE
Netware is dead but OpenSuSE is still kicking. Although I'm thinking about switch to Ubuntu.
This issue is very serious. The Senate Finance Committee recently held an investigative session on stock option backdating chaired by Chuck Grassley (R-IA). The upshot was -- of course -- to continue investigating the matter further. A video ( rtsp://video.c-span.org/15days/e090606_finance.rm ) of the investigatory session has been posted by C-SPAN, and is well worth watching for anyone interested in corporate financial shenanigans to illicitly increase executive compensation.
For those uninitiated with the process, stock option backdating is a form of option fraud whereby options which should be dated at time B (when the executive was hired, for example) but are instead backdated time A (when they are 'in the money') to insure a profit for the executive. It's crass and obviously illegal.
Watch the video and you'll enjoy seeing our representatives (on both sides of the isle) enjoying a collegial and humorous discussion on the record with those who should have been asked numerous uncomfortable questions about the practice. There are, fortunately, some very pointed questions. But the session often comes off as a giveaway to the witnesses, with senators and witnesses often laughing together at in-jokes.
If you're bothered by stock market insiders fraudulently diverting profits to their friends instead of keeping the market fair and clean, this committee session will make your blood boil.
I'm sure my network instructor doesn't think the Novell and Apple merger will now happen as he speculated a few years ago. I suspect he was pimping the stocks since he had shares of both in his retirement account.
They are still around. We use them here at the New Mexico Child, Youth and Family Development Department. It's actually one of the main reasons we managed to convince our management to go open source. Novell bought SuSE Linux, and we got 50 free SuSE Linux Enterprise Server licenses with full support. Now most of our back end stuff runs on SuSE. We still use Novell file and print servers, though.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Hmmm if you don't turn in your report on time, you're suspended :P where have I heard that sort of policy before? Geeze, I thought they get most of their people from Harvard and stuff.
Is it just me or is it not going to upgrade to Vista in here?
Novell simply did not file some paperwork by the deadline because Novell is still working on stats related to awarding stock options.
Once they get those stats straight and file the paperwork, they'll be back in compliance and out of delisting danger (from this issue).
If Dell didn't have a monopoly, we'd have to choose from among IBM Thinkpads, iBooks, HP Pavillions, and who-knows-what else.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Novell still has a lot of great software. I think they have the best webmail interface, although it's free Hula is a free version of Novell's NetMail. If I was implementing a webmail solution right now I would definately lean towards Novell's NetMail w/ eDirectory.
The issue of how to represent stock options (i.e., the *option* for an employee to buy stock at some pre-determined rate that may be below the market price, and may or may not be redeemed for stock) on a balance sheet is a difficult, and often debated one. Standards about how to represent them on a balance sheet have changed recently, and it's understandable about how there would be errors here. Even Apple screwed up this way (can't find the link, but it was on slashdot a month or so ago).
Why not focus on the REAL crime in accounting: the handling of pensions and health care obligations? For decades they were allowed to basically say, "hey, when it comes time to pay you, trust us, we'll have new revenues, and we'll pay you out of that". By not putting these obligations on the balance sheet now, millions of workers' pensions are at risk, and the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation may go bankrupt as corporations try to shuck defined benefit plans (which are stupid anyway, but I digress). For GM and I'm sure several others, the present value of these obligations would more than cancel out their entire book value, i.e., the nominal value of all assets they hold. Oops!
And this isn't about some high-paid employees getting a little extra cash. This is about *retirement money*. And they're still allowed to hide the true cost of these things.
Someone's priorities are out of order...
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Except Windows 95 is really broken. Trust me on that! Netware, on the other hand, is pretty solid (except for 4.11 out of the box. That thing needed a few patches).
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
the Weakest Link, Good Bye
here are the university of manchester they are still using them for thier main login system and many shared file areas (homedirs have been moved to a new san which i belive is samba based but moving shared file areas has been abandoned at least in our department due to very different permissions handling).
they is also zenworks application deployment which is very very usefull if you have lots of users using lots of different software and moving arround a lot (read: students)
afaict netware makes thier money through selling more licenses (client and server) to existing customers and pressuring customers into upgrades by refusing to sell more cals for older versions, at least thats the impression i get from some people i've spoken too.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
VA Linux faced a NASDAQ delisting in 2001, due to their penny-stock status (3 months of a closing price under $1.00 leads to delisting). NASDAQ gave everybody a 3-month repreive following the 9/11 bombings, by which time they managed lay off most of their employees, stop hemoraging cash, and escape delisting.
Oddly enough, that wasn't "news for nerds" or "stuff that matters" -- it was -1 troll. I wonder if it still is :)
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
No. Hardly.
This is more plausible deniability on NASDAQ's part. It looks like they are playing "Tough Electronic Market Enforcer." Like most policies and procedures:
1. Some Admin Assistant at each company gets to fill out forms and write letters to the Exchange for someone else to sign.
2. Forms are sent to NASDAQ for "review" which takes a remarkably long time. So long in fact that Dell gets the SEC matter resolved through political donations to a couple of PAC's and their local reps.
3. And in the nick of time so both companies get to stay on the exchange!
The -only- people that get the book thrown at them are egregious and stupid violators that don't knuckle under or don't pay to play. Martha Stewart is an excellent example. Complicated schemes like back-dating options will catch 1 maybe two of at least dozens of companies that did it. The proverbial "mission accomplished."
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
May the Maths Be with you!
If the battery goes off...
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
You go first, and let all of us know how it goes.
What can posibly go wrong?
In many countries it has worked SO well, after all.
To be clear, Apple is conducting their own internal investigation, but is not under investigation by the SEC or any other third party. They have not received any delisting notices.
Source: http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=2049
Why not focus on the REAL crime in accounting: the handling of pensions and health care obligations? For decades they were allowed to basically say, "hey, when it comes time to pay you, trust us, we'll have new revenues, and we'll pay you out of that". By not putting these obligations on the balance sheet now, millions of workers' pensions are at risk, and the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation may go bankrupt [...]
Why should the government make the companies do that? They do exactly the same thing with Social Security. Just substitute "Federal Treasury" for "Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation".
The fed "borrows" from the Social Security "trust fund", substituting special treasury bonds with ridiculously low interest rates, and these bonds are NOT included in the national debt calculation. Then the fed spends the money - which will eventually have to be made up from other taxes.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It could be a good thing: This will probably drive their stock price down quite a bit. If they hire you, any options you get will be set that much lower. After this all blows over, the price will recover and you collect the difference.
The actual thing that should make you rethink your interview is their almost uninterrupted history of marketing blunders over the past 15 years.
I also work with some companies that don't get rid of software and I have a a few hundred clients still using ccmail, yep ccmail. And a bunch of those on Novell 3/4 servers (yep 3.12 still survives). It aint broke and they havent fixed it, but at some time I keep telling them those servers will finally go down and they will break and they will have to fix it.
Example, have one client running a ccmail network on a NT cluster on servers that have to be 1996? That is an example of how to run a network on 5 cents a day. coarse then it breaks and then it costs you $250,000 a day in losses, but some people just don't understand that.
This is like the Pinkslip you get from the power company when you dont get the bill paid on time.
-- I am the NRA, enough said...
Its hardly surprising that Dell are being investigated for accounting anomolies. Its probably not their fault however. They don't even know the price of their own stock :P
p ed_asa/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08/02/dells_rap
. ..
But there isn't any real reason for netware to break. Yes you may have to replace hardware but there really isn't any good reason that server can not run 10 or 20 years. The problems will be getting spare parts.
I find it funny that people think that if it isn't new it must be replaced. As long as you can get replacement parts for the hardware it should be work for a very long time.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
well ok think of it this way.
/Rant
Your a public company, with employees, and stock holders, and various other things that you HAVE TO work to maintain a good corporation for.
You then decide on the risk of using software that IS NOT supported, and in many cases, the company who wrote it is 5-10 years out of business. Now what is the risk of hardware failure when you you probably dont even have all the hardware or software diskettes (CDs werent even used back then) to reproduce the hardware or drivers or software on another server?
ok you accept the risk? Fine its a risk and acceptable, but did you inform the board of directors who might then need to inform all the employees, stockholders, investors, and all of the people who it is their duty to inform, that if the software or hardware goes down, you could lose your XXXX database and that whole business process for XX amount of days and the information might not be recoverable?
Risk is risk and I understand not spending money if the risk is offest by price (say upgrading from Exchange 2000 to Exchange 2003, for alot of people, not worth the cost). BUT if you do not first make an informed decision and only think Money, then do not inform those who also have to take the risk into consideration. Then you are endagering your stockholders or worse your employees might not have a job next week. That is not a risk assessment, that is a person who is endangering a greater group of people. There are many of them out there, in 15 years of consulting i have seen dozens, if not more.
And isn't that the whole gotcha of the Title of this article in the first place? Informing people about how you do things and the decisions you make. Be it giving away stock or maintaining a decade over peice of software or hardware... Have you truely informed and taken a good risk assumption?
You're getting a shareholder lawsuit!
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Come, comrade; let us toast mother Russia and sing songs of the glory days! [/thick_russian_accent]
In Soviet Russia, NASDAQ lists you. Oh, wait...
Good going, that comment just dropped LNUX from $4.15 to $3.95.
BTW, 2006 has been good to them (from wikipedia):
On February 21, 2006, VA Software reported its first ever profitable quarter. Net income for the second quarter stands at $10.5 million, or 17 cents per share, compared to a net loss of $702,000, or a penny a share, in the previous year's second quarter. Excluding one time gains from the sale of Animation Factory, VA's profit that quarter would have been $1.1 million, or 2 cents per share[5]. VA followed this performance with two more consecutive profitable quarters, earning $1.1 million in Q306 and $700,000 in fiscal Q406, which ended on July 31. Fiscal 2006 was VA Software's first ever profitable year, with total earnings of $11 million, or 17 cents per share ($1.3 million, or 2 cents a share, if Animation Factory asset sale gains are excluded). VA ended the year with $51.9 million in the bank, up from $36.6 million the previous year
Notice, after the new site design, profit has really gone up. But what really kick started it? "OMG!!! Ponies!!!" of April 1. Thinking about this, I finally figured it out!
1. Step one
2. Step two
3. ????????
4. Profit!
Step 3? OMG!!! Ponies!!!
I8-D
Let's run the United States right into the ground. And let's do it by making it impossible for businesses to operate here. After all, that's where all the economic power comes from. So we'll do that by creating such a monstrocity of laws and regulations affecting businesses, and the larger and more successful the business, the more cumbersome, expensive, and downright unfair the regulations should be. If it becomes a public company, the pinnacle of achievement for many businesses, then we should turn every financial action of the company into an investigation for accounting irregularities. In the meantime, there should be no tarriffs on imports anymore, and we should encourage companies to outsource, or outright move, to China. And by doing all of the above, we'll successfully run the United States right into the ground.
I'm glad to see the scab picked off questionable securities practicies (screw you, robber-baron corporate weasels), but this headline is a bit tabloid. These notices are routine and automatic, coming to nothing once the company in question files their tardy report.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
DRM 'manages access' in the same way that a prison 'manages freedom'
I already de-listed them from my personal give-a-sh*t list.
but this sounds even more impactive. ouch!
But seriously, after Sarbanes-Oxley forced them to call a dollar a dollar, what companies still give their peons stock options? I know that MS moved to grants rather than options...
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
Opportunity cost - if something like email were to get nastily horked and you had no support, that could kill your company. How many chambers before you're willing to play russian roulette?
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
I didn't say that you don't need any support -- I said that you wouldn't need support from *the authors*. Of course you should have an employee or a contractor that supports it.
DRM 'manages access' in the same way that a prison 'manages freedom'
A significant number of companies are having to restate past and current earnings (the latter is what is causing the delisting notices to go out, because the 10-Q for the most recent ended quarter has to also be restated) so given the situation, the flurry of delisting notices is not surprising. NASDAQ maintains a daily list of companies not in compliance with continued listing requirements; today's list (9/21) had about 70 or so companies delinquent on their quarterly or annual reports (10-Q and 10-K) to the SEC. Most of the other companies don't meet the minimum $1 bid price (a company's shares trading below $1 for more than thirty days are served a notice of intent to delist, and have 180 days to come back into compliance.
Other reasons that could result in a delisting letter from NASDAQ include failure to maintain:
Other notable companies that face delisting include nVidia, Autodesk, BEA Systems, CNET, Verisign, and the Cheesecake Factory. The reason? Delinquent 10-K or 10-Q filings.
I too used to support old software - often on novell 3.12 or Windows NT 4. The problem I've run into most of all is these people don't make regular backups and the machines and these file servers are running on are typically 386/486 pc's - not even server class hardware. I've never met anyone who takes their business seriously use antique hardware/software that few know how to maintain - least of which the shop/company owner.
The call that came in most often was the hard drive died and they lost all their data. Or they just bought some new pc's at worst buy and want to make them talk to the Novell machine (and on a side note: the built in Netware client for XP does a dandy job of talking to 3.x machines - its just no-one knows how to set it up anymore).
1. Novell isn't out of business.
2. Most Novell servers are used for file-servers and or print servers. With good backups it is a very low risk.
3. Software doesn't wear out. It doesn't less reliable over time. Yes there is a time when keeping up to day makes a lot of sense. There are times to keep using what works.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.