03.13.10
Novell News Summary – Part III: Pulse With Google, Finance, Virtualisation and More
Salt Lake Valley
Summary: Novell’s proprietary business assets and what they have been up to in the past week
NOVELL news coverage has recently been overwhelmed by the big bid [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. Novell’s PR team has been very active despite all of this and it hardly even mentioned the bid, instead choosing to focus on fluff like SaaS and a survey that Novell was conducting itself in order to support its position, apparently.
Interestingly enough, Novell recently conducted a survey of its customers and discovered that 43% of them would be more inclined to consider and purchase an SaaS offering if it included just such a solution.
Pulse
Will Novell’s Pulse be more connected to Wave than anyone has anticipated? Maybe.
Do the Wave: Rasmussen Dishes on Google’s New Collaboration Tool
[...]
What kind of other companies do you envision becoming Wave providers?
Rasmussen: For example, Novell (News – Alert). They have product coming up [in 2010] called Pulse, which they describe as an enterprise social network-type product. And they announced, and we’re working pretty hard with them, that they will support Wave. So when you’re insidePulse ( News – Alert) you can start a Wave inside Pulse using Novell technology.
If I’m a Google user, you can add me to that Wave, and we can Wave together even though you’re using Novell’s product and I’m using Google’s product.
At the same time, Google challenges GroupWise and costing Novell a lot of money. Novell’s PR team is promoting the following new video (one of a series of two so far) about Pulse.
Misc.
The ballot which Microsoft uses to pretend [1, 2, 3, 4] that there is choice in the market (as long as Internet Explorer remains installed) gets Novell mentioned in IDG. Novell used to actually stand up for what’s right and not be so supine.
Well, it’s the direct result of a long-standing legal dilemma between Microsoft and the European Union. The whole issue began in 1993, brought on through a complaint by Novell that Microsoft’s licensing arrangements with computer manufacturers violated Europe’s competition rules.
Can Novell thrive by being a jack of all trades? That’s the question this person asks.
One IT vendor that faces such a problem is Novell. It once had a clear market-leading position – in the 1980s and early 1990s Novell’s NetWare network operating system was the network operating system of choice for sharing files among workgroups. The ascendancy of Windows, Linux, the IP protocol, among other things, led to a fall in demand for NetWare and left Novell seeking a new identity.
Hungary still considers buying from Novell, which makes the following predictions.
Software distributor Novell projects 5%-10% revenue growth in 2010 in Hungary even though it sees the Hungarian IT market expanding only modestly during the year.
Can Hungary press on with a company other than Microsoft and Novell now that standards are required?
Finance
Mentioned some weeks ago was Ron Hovsepian's ridiculous bonus, which takes up a lot of the revenue of this ~3,900-person company. IDG has this to say on the subject:
Novell president and CEO Ron Hovsepian’s total compensation fell 17% in 2009, amid declining annual revenue and a wider net loss.
Hovsepian received compensation in fiscal 2009 valued at $5.7 million, compared to $6.9 million in 2008, according to documents filed late last week with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
People concentrate on the relative decline, but not on the absolute value. What did Hovsepian actually do which makes him deserving of this “compensation” (euphemism for bonus)?
In other financial news we have:
• Novell Zenwork Asset Management Renewal
• U.S. Stocks Rise as Jobs Report, Takeovers Lift Confidence
• ETF Preview: Mixed Early Action for Broad Funds; Novell Offer Could Lift Tech
• The S&P 500′s Biggest Movers
• Notable Biggest S&P Stock gainers (Sprint, YUM, SWN, NOVL, WYNN, NVDA, ODP)
• Interesting Options Volume for Novell Inc (NOVL)
Networks
An anonymous writer recalls “cleaning up after a networking vendor’s bad behavior”. Novell is mentioned right at the start.
Back in the late ’80s, I worked for a group specializing in Novell networks. Sharing network resources among PCs was a new and upcoming field, and the Novell operating system was quickly turning into the standard among small businesses. We had a prospective new client in an upscale community: a law firm that wanted to replace its current vendor and its network.
Virtualisation
This new article from David Strom quotes Novell on the subject of virtualisation.
“If you lose one of these servers entirely, you could have a problem, particularly since on average, eight or more VMs are typically running on a single box,” says Carl Drisko, a Novell executive who specializes in virtualization.
Novell has this new video promoting Intelligent Workload Management on YouTube and the state of XenApp for Windows 2008 is also worth mentioning.
Novell’s GroupWise is included in the list of products which CompanionLink supports and in YouTube there is a new video featuring bits from GroupWise.
People
Novell’s CTO becomes the W3C's CEO and this is covered in many more places [1, 2, 3] including the in-print media.
Filling a position left open since 2008, former Novell CTO Jeffrey Jaffe has taken on the role of chief executive officer for the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium).
Here is Jaffe’s first post at the W3C blogs. Can he be trusted?
Additionally, there’s this person being appointed:
Before that he spent five years running his own Australian-based consultancy specialising in IT security, VoIP services and training. Stevens is also a certified Cisco instructor, a certified Novell engineer, and a qualified Microsoft trainer.
Partners
Novell makes some more links around India.
Novell today announced that the Novell India Partner Academy, a training programme exclusively developed for Novell’s partners to assist them in selling, distributing and supporting Novell’s suite of enterprise IT solutions and held for the first time in Colombo, was a major success. Novell partners graduating from the training will be able to provide pre-sales consulting and professional services in addition to post-sales support and training to their own customers.
There is also this:
The IDenium server integrates into Microsoft AD, Novell eDirectory and Citrix, providing great flexibility in deployment and user management.
Novell gets mentioned in a couple of press releases [1, 2] and an article about Utah.
Marketing
Novell is promoting Identity Management with “guest blogs” [1, 2] and security problems are found too (but hardly mentioned anywhere).
The following new videos were created/uploaded by Novell some days ago:
It is believed that SAP might buy Novell or just parts of Novell. █
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