IT Jungle has the tendency to patiently cover news stories about a week after they make their initial appearance. The analysis is typically more profound as result.
Commercial Linux distributor Novell may be very happy about the growth that it is seeing from its SUSE Linux products and has certainly dodged a bullet by embracing Linux as plain vanilla NetWare sales go into what is probably a permanent, if very elongated, decline. But Linux is still, by the numbers, a very small piece of the business at Novell, even if it does give Novell mindshare in today's IT space as the major--some might say only--alternative to Red Hat.
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Of course, Novell's Workgroup division, which sells the Open Enterprise Server amalgam of NetWare and Linux, should probably be counted as much as Linux as not at this point, and this is still the largest part of Novell. In the second fiscal quarter, OES sales fell by 1.5 percent to $48.2 million, and NetWare sales fell by 7.1 percent to just under $6 million, with NetWare licenses down and support costs up. Novell's GroupWise and related collaboration software brought in $28.2 million in sales, up 7.7 percent, within the Workgroup division, and with all the other software in this unit tossed into the mix, the Workgroup division brought in $92.4 million, down 9/10ths of a percent. Identity management, a big deal for Novell for the past decade, accounted for $30.7 million in sales, up 6.4 percent, and systems and resource management, another area where Novell has tried to put a heterogeneous stake in the ground, brought in just under $41 million, up 15.4 percent.
Part of the deal called for Microsoft to pony up $240 million to Novell so, in exchange, it could hand out coupons to customers for Novell's server Linux. From the looks of it, Microsoft hasn't exactly been wasting time.
"To date, we have invoiced $157 million, or 65 percent of the original five-year, $240 million agreement," Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian told financial analysts last week when discussing his company's most recent financial performance.