Summary: A look at some of the latest confirmed departures, which appear in the press just weeks after the acquisition of Novell

Novell is pretty much collapsing, as expected. Some acquisitions are smooth and unshaky, but this one is not. Top managers are leaving in droves based on this one summary which says: "Several of Novell‘s top executives — including Ronald W. Hovsepian, Dana C. Russell, John K. Dragoon, Colleen A. O’Keefe, Scott N. Semel and James P. Ebzery — have exited the company following Attachmate‘s recent buyout of Novell. Sources say Novell has made additional staff cuts"

We wrote about Dragoon when he himself announced that he was leaving (here too). His Novell blog, just like many of the rest, has been silent since then. Novell.com became somewhat of a ghost town as even the PR staff says nothing (on average it used to have output once in a couple of days). Let us remember that Dragoon was CMO, where "M" stands for marketing. We wrote about his departure before and he was not alone among those who left just before the deal with AttachMSFT got finalised. It does not seem as though many or any of Novell's managers are going to stay as even SUSE got shaken up. All of them will probably get a compensation package that others will not. They don't need sympathy and those below them will probably just envy. People who sell out to Microsoft receive millions in bonuses while those who do all the real work receive nearly nothing.

Further down the management chain there are departures of significance. Alan Murray has also left, based on an article which says: "Murray was most recently vice president of product marketing at Novell Inc., where he oversaw the company’s Systems and Resource Management and Identity Security and Management units. Before joining Apperian, Welch was senior vice president for worldwide sales at Aveksa. He also held sales management and business development positions at Netegrity."

Another departure of potentially high impact is the departure of Naresh Shah, who becomes a vice president of engineering at one of Novell's old partners. To quote the Indian press, "Shah joins HP from Novell, where he served as Managing Director of Novell's India Development Centre (IDC) and Vice President of Global Engineering Strategy, responsible for overall product development activities."

"People who sell out to Microsoft receive millions in bonuses while those who do all the real work receive nearly nothing."Steve Hale is another one who is making his move. "Hale came on board U.K.-based Sophos from Novell, where he held the position of vice president of global channel sales in the security, systems management and operating platform group, specializing in driving Novell's "Workload IQ" partner sales and delivery approach to the Intelligent Workload Management marketplace, according to Hale's LinkedIn page." This is further verified here.

Kavanagh has left too and to quote The Australian, "James Kavanagh joins RSA's Brisbane sales team, responsible for accounts including Queensland government customers and leading financial services companies. He has toiled for Directory Concepts and Novell."

These people may not have left very recently, but they are in fact out. It is news to us. There are several more examples and this new article mentions Colleen O'Keefe. Novell's Vice President (one of them) is seen here or here:

Scott Lewis, Novell's Vice President of Partner Marketing, commented on this merger of two leading Novell (NOVL) services partners. "Novacoast's acquisition of Data Technique, Inc. is a significant channel development for Novell customers," said Lewis. "This merger combines the reach and service levels of two strong Novell Partners for our shared customers. Both companies have services capabilities that combine with Novell and other products to meet customers' needs for Intelligent Workload Management from physical to virtual to cloud computing environments."

So many vice presidents have left.

Well, another former Noveller is mentioned here and Novell's vice president Miguel de Icaza is confirmed to have left or been laid off now that he moves into startup mode, despite apparent trademark issues. This Microsoft MVP announced Trojarin and the first publication to do an interview with him about it is 'Microsoft press'. To quote one bit of this promotional piece (the Microsoft proponents still groom de Icaza):

But Mono never truly flowered under Novell, de Icaza said, especially in the mobile space. In fact, one of the reasons he is sanguine about the layoffs is that he and his Mono mates have been trying to spinoff the technology from Novell for more than a year.

This probably just says that Novell too was not particularly interested in Mono. Microsoft was. It still is. ⬆