11.21.09
Novell News Summary – Part III: SCO Updates, Company Financials, and Tech Data Arrangements
Summary: Despite being a quiet week for Novell, there are items worth highlighting as follows
UK Press
AS noted yesterday, The Register has come up with a lot of Google-hostile articles recently. Here is one of them that mentions Novell:
Salesforce.com is a big Google partner and fellow cloud evangelist. On the more traditional business-user front, Novell has so-far stepped up with Pulse, its implementation of Wave with features added for the use by the enterprise.
Timothy from The Register turns out to be cross-posting now. Here is his latest article that mentions Novell as follows.
Now it is time for IBM to get serious and buy Red Hat before Oracle does. In a pinch, snapping up Citrix Systems and Novell would also do.
The Yorkshire Evening Post has this new article that mentions Novell also.
The company now boasts a turnover of £1.8m, employs around 15 Leeds staff and has a contract with Novell, one of the biggest software companies in the US.
SCO
Only Groklaw has been keeping track of things, ranging from the AutoZone case to the bankruptcy.
SCO’s Chapter 11 Trustee Edward Cahn has filed an objection to the Wayne Gray motion to lift the stay. Cahn says that to characterize the Wayne Gray motion as “highly irregular” would be “an understatement”.
Groklaw also published a good article which is titled: “Why the GPL Sinks SCO’s Copyright Infringement Claims, Even if it Owned the Copyrights”
I’ve started to wonder if Novell or IBM has explained to SCO’s Chapter 11 Trustee Edward Cahn how the GPL works. It cuts through all the other ways SCO is bound to lose, in my view. Then, I thought: why not just explain it myself? You never know. It might prove useful to put it all in one place. So, here goes, SCO and the GPL.
Finance
An analysis of Red Hat’s financials mentions Novell as follows:
However, pricing pressure from its major competitors such as Novell Inc. (NOVL), Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) and Oracle (ORCL) in the virtualization business may hurt the company’s results in the near future.
This one is more specific to Novell:
Company Financials: Novell, Inc – Aarkstore Enterprise
[...]
The Company Financials offers insights into the financial performance of the company over last five years for about 1000 leading global companies. The datapack covers wealth of financial information relating to income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statements.
Netware/Old
One historical reference to Netware can be seen here, but that’s about it.
Other older products that are mentioned can be found here (mentioned last week).
North Georgia College & State University in Dahlonega has selected Matrix42′s Empirum version 12 for software and patch management. The new deployment replaces a legacy collection of manual processes, scripts, and Novell applications.
ZENworks again:
LiveTime 6 also includes 12 pre-integrated connectors supporting Loginventory, LANDesk, Tivoli Discovery, Novell ZENworks Desktop, Asset and Configuration Management products,Spiceworks ( News – Alert), Express Software Manager, LANrev, Microsoft SMS and SCCM 2007, as well as Centennial.
Virtualisation
A Microsoft-associated ‘news’ site gave Novell Storage Manager a mention in this article about AutoVirt.
According to Toigo, “I would also encourage folks to look at Novell Storage Manager (NSM) and some of the products from Crossroads Systems. And, isn’t this a cautionary tale we should be considering as we examine some of Cisco’s woo in the hardware-centric data management space?”
More examples here and also here, despite it being nothing significant.
While Dell is the latest, it isn’t the only vendor selling virtual desktop, single sign-on offerings to healthcare organizations. Other vendors include Sychron and Novell.
Groupwise is mentioned in relation to the Blackberry (yes, again), Android/Droid, and also in relation to Los Angeles (it never ends).
It supports Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus Domino, Novell GroupWise etc.
In October, the Los Angeles City Council unanimously approved the ITA’s plan to switch from Novell GroupWise to Google Apps, via a $7.5 million implementation that will be managed by Computer Sciences Corp.
It seems safe to say that GroupWise is usually being phased out and rarely phased in. Here is another new loss for GroupWise.
Customer-Service Oriented Massachusetts Bank Optimizes its Microsoft Exchange Email Environment with Mimosa NearPoint Following Migration from Novell GroupWise.
More information about this migration can be found here (or here).
With rapid growth being derived from its entrepreneurial mission, Enterprise Bank decided to migrate from Novell GroupWise to Microsoft Exchange to better support its communications infrastructure. Email had become the backbone application for company communication and with its GroupWise environment, archiving and individual item recovery was not possible. As a result, the active community bank also sought a comprehensive archiving solution that would provide complete data protection, proactive eDiscovery, and end-user search functionality in a unified offering.
Groupwise was also mentioned in this article. Regarding Evolution, we have this:
I am also trying out the Novell Evolution PIM (Personal Information Manager), which is very Gnome-like in its simplicity/lack-of-customisationism. The integrated calendar is pretty swish though, next step is to integrate it more with Thinking Rock.
Identity/Management
Despite some cage-rattling from Novell’s PR, this part of Novell’s business seems rather dormant. Novell is a minor player in this area. From IDG:
One-quarter turn to Symantec’s products to manage client systems, and 11% use LANDesk (now part of Avocent). IBM, HP, CA, BMC and Novell each represented less than 10% of those polled by Forrester.
Security
There is nothing to see here except a couple of SUSE flaws.
People/Partners
A former Novell employee becomes Vice President elsewhere, which may impact future relationships.
Newman began his career as a software engineer for Novell, Inc., eventually becoming EVP of the $1B NetWare Systems group. In 1996 he founded KeyLabs, Inc. and sold that company to Exodus Communications for $42 million in 1999. Prior to selling KeyLabs, he founded Altiris, Inc., a company that used software delivery technology developed at KeyLabs to revolutionize the systems management industry. Altiris completed a public offering in 2002 and was purchased by Symantec Corp. in 2007 for more than $1B.
Novell has just partnered with Logica.
IT services provider Novell, Inc .and Logica Management Consulting, consulting arm of leading IT and business services company, today announced their partnership for bringing a combined governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) offering with SAP to the market.
Tech Data continues to grow closer to Novell (also covered here).
Open Tech builds upon Tech Data’s extensive experience supporting open source leaders like Novell and Red Hat. That experience includes helping these top open source vendors grow their businesses through the channel by recruiting new resellers to deploy their solutions to SMBs, large enterprises, government agencies, educational institutions and healthcare facilities.
Novell’s PR people wrote about it and so did IDG.
While Tech Data carries Red Hat and Novell – the two big guys in this space that are particularly strong in the data centre – the distie hasn’t traditionally carried ISV applications to round out a complete solution. To add to the mix, there are also tier-one players that offer open-source SKUs, such as Microsoft, Oracle and Symantec. And since there’s a growing demand for open source, the distie is attempting to step it up a notch.
Another bit of evidence of a relationship can be seen here (IBS), here, and here.
The company is a general representative of Hewlett Packard/Compaq, Alcatel, Canon, Cisco, Novell, Oracle and APC on the Albanian market.
The demand for such tools has attracted the attention of a variety of vendors, including BeyondTrust, which last month unveiled what it termed the first first privileged account management product for heterogeneous IT environments, along with CA, Quest Software and Novell.
DMTF always has Novell’s role mentioned, not just when Novell’s perspective is promoted. Novell was additionally mentioned in some other articles and press releases, one of which speaks of driver compatibility tests issued by Microsoft and Novell (separately).
All Edimax products are CE,FCC and C-Tick emission certified in addition to driver compatibility tests performed by Microsoft, Novell and NSTL.
So that’s where it ends. Nothing too significant this week. █
