04.04.08
Do-No-Evil Saturday – Part III: ZENworks, Richard Whitehead, DR-DOS, Bomgar and Honeywell
Whether you trust those silly ‘awards’ and ‘nominations’ or not, Novell has just won a Gold Award for ZENworks Endpoint Security Management. Whatever this award actually means is up to one’s imagination, but there you go.
Over here, Novell’s Richard Whitehead speaks about a variety of things he is familiar with.
Richard Whitehead the Director of Product Marketing at Novell talks with Craig about IT storage options and the security implications involved as well as how to mitigate your risk.
Bits about Novell are included in this audiocast from The Register as well. Novell is not the sole focus though.
David Berlind seems to be with Disinformation Week now, at least in part. One wonders if the bankruptcy of Ziff Davis and recent layoffs at CNET have something to do with this. Regardless, Berlind wrote this article about Energy Camp. Energy-saving initiatives are something which Novell is involved in, but herein, Berlind only uses Novell for an analogy.
I’m reminded of how, through the ’80s and ’90s, Novell was able to set the agenda for the network operating system (NOS) discussion: speed. IPX as a protocol was way faster than anything out of the SMB/NetBIOS camp (IBM, Microsoft, and DEC) and Novell had the IT community convinced that your LAN wasn’t worth a hill o’ beans unless it was faster than lightning. As a former benchmarker of NOS performance, I now realize what a joke that was. Especially now that so many LANs run over plain old IP instead. Nevertheless, Novell got to set the agenda and its fortunes grew until internal conflict about how to deal with Redmond sent the company on a downward spiral that it is still trying to recover from today. While it lasted, though, it was clever marketing, and I see the same thing happening in the energy-savings space.
Speaking of old-age Novell, have a look at this new article, which touched the DR-DOS story and Novell. It’s from the Washington Post.
DR-DOS’s heyday, such as it was, was over by the mid-1990s, but its story didn’t end there. In 1991, networking kingpin Novell bought Digital Research, and DR-DOS eventually became Novell DOS; in 1996, Novell sold the operating system to Caledera, which renamed it Caldera OpenDOS. Caldera also sued Microsoft for anti-competitive practices, saying that among other things, Microsoft designed its own applications to alarm users with scary error messages when run on top of DR-DOS. Microsoft settled the lawsuit in 2000; by that time it felt like a flashback to the time in which DOS, rather than Windows, was the key to the company’s dominance.
For more information about DR-DISS (sic), see [1, 2, 3, 4]. It’s truly appalling and its serves as an eternal reminder of Microsoft’s business practices. Here is a lesser-known quote:
“I feel we are much too smug in dealing with Novell. Perhaps they didn’t hurt us in DOS yet — but it’s not because of product or their trying. It’s because we already had the OEMs wrapped up.”
–Jim Allchin, Microsoft
A couple of weeks ago we wrote about Novell’s problem with technical support, which customer complained about at BrainShare. It seems like Novell has recruited Bomgar to assist with the burden.
Bomgar Corporation announced today that its remote desktop access appliance will provide a key component for supporting Novell’s Volume License Agreement (VLA) maintenance program. The new VLA maintenance program provides Novell’s customers with unlimited access to technical assistance and product support via Novell Technical Services Online.
Novell’s relationship with Honeywell (also mentioned fairly recently) gets another mention owing to identity management integration.
Novell, a provider of infrastructure software, has integrated its identity management product into Honeywell’s access-control security platform. The two companies have collaborated to deliver a secure access and provisioning solution for physical and logical assets that addresses requirements of high-security businesses, such as financial services and health care institutions. As a result, organizations can automatically provision and control user access across disparate systems, while also gaining a holistic view of access occurrences for increased security and compliance, according to Novell.
Not too shabby, but let’s keep an eye open. Novell is still close to Linux’s self-admitted fierce rival.
Enjoy the weekend! █
