11.29.10
Novell’s Last Week – Part VI: Novell’s Proprietary Business Faces Uncertain Future Under AttachMSFT
Summary: Despite lack of news coverage about Novell’s proprietary software assets, it is worth assessing the impact of AttachMSFT discontinuing parts of it
EWEEK claims that “Novell [Is] Saying Little About Post-Attachmate ZENworks Plans” and this relates to what we wrote a week ago.
It will be at least a week until Novell customers begin to get a clearer idea of what will happen with their favorite products after Attachmate closes on its acquisition of the company.
Regardless of what AttachMSFT will do with ZENworks, Novell has finally released some more behind-the-scenes footage from “ZENworks vs the World” (advertisement).
Here is the final outcome and a post-processed version. It’s quite nice.
Will AttachMSFT keep ZENworks alive and release more versions of it? This remains to be seen. Regarding identity management in general, there is this new article and video, but will Novell staff keep it alive under its new incubation wing? We are doubtful. Another product which might not make the cut at AttachMSFT is simply too immature and it has just been renamed "Vibe" (formerly "Pulse"). That was just days before the AttachMSFT deal got announced and Google sought a new home for its codebase (Vibe/Pulse mentioned in this article, as well as in [1, 2]). In more recent videos, as we showed earlier this month, Vibe started boasting more Microsoft integration and there is this new presentation about it.
Will AttachMSFT bother with Vibe, which is not even a finished product just yet? Whatever they decide to do, Novell’s marketing puppets (in Spanish) will carry on throwing videos into YouTube [1, 2], hoping for one last “hurrah” before the less successful operations get shut down. AttachMSFT is not a charity and being the proprietary company that it is, it is likely to behave like Oracle.
Within months or just weeks we won’t be hearing so much about Novell. Perhaps AttachMSFT will carry on using the trademark (like AMD uses “ATI”), but there has been no clarification about it. █
