Summary: Novell's business is still dwindling and Novell may be pulled back into the courtroom because of its former friend, SCO

"Novell ditches direct sales incentive" according to this new article that also gives out some curious numbers which we never saw before. We already knew that Novell's channel was broken (Novell admitted this) but the actual numbers are staggering:

Veitkus, who was drafted into EMEA in 2007 to sort out its problematic channel, has spent the last three years re-organising its programmes and distribution. “It was a bit crazy,” he comments on the 13 distributors the firm had in the UK when he arrived. Many had been added as the acquisition-hungry vendor had increased its product footprint, but had remained stagnant. “We cut a lot of dead wood...and we spend a lot of time and effort to ensure that the remaining partners had a strong economic reason for being with Novell,” says Veitkus.

The cull resulted in around a third of the 2000 plus EMEA partners leaving Novell, and distributors rationalised down to just five including Magirus, Bell Micro, Avnet and ECS Arrow. However, in the last 12 months, Novell has added a further 479 partners across the region as demand for its products has grown.

In case we do not cover Novell quite as much we used to, it's just because there is hardly any Novell news. No announcements, no new products, no acquisitions. Novell seems like a dead asset waiting to be picked up. It was interesting to find this new article with some historical perspective:

GoMo News recalls an early rival to Novell’s NetWare called Waterloo Port, for example. Plus, wasn’t the University of Waterloo heavily involved in the early development of Linux? The veteran British online conferencing system, CIX www.cixonline.com, used its software.

Decades later Novell is still stuck with a dependency on NetWare. And based on other news (mentioned in [1, 2] and also yesterday), Novell and SCO may continue to look decades back into ownership of UNIX.

Novell is a company living in the past; there is nothing substantial for Novell in the future. ⬆

Correction of external article: In the article cited above there is an error. Dj Walker-Morgan says that CoSy, as used by CIX, was from the University of Guelph, not Waterloo.