Novell Drops Another Event and Loses Major Contract with City of Los Angeles

Dr. Roy Schestowitz

2009-08-01 15:26:16 UTC
Modified: 2009-08-01 15:26:16 UTC

Summary: Another event off the calendar for Novell

FIRST it was BrainShare 2009 and now this:

For the first time ever, Salt Lake hosted the Meeting Professionals International.

"That is the association of people who plan meetings and conventions for a living," White explained.

But Novell won't be meeting at the Salt Palace this year; it's their first cancellation in 20 years. They've promised to be back next year.

BrainShare 2009 was canceled due to low demand and Novell is working hard to make it happen next year, which is still doubtful because Novell has debt and problematic business performance.

In other news, it seems as though the City of Los Angeles will soon abandon GroupWise. That's a lot of lost seats.

The controversy centers on a plan by the City of Los Angeles to replace its Novell GroupWise e-mail and Microsoft Office applications with Google Apps. Under the $7.25 million plan, the city will transition about 30,000 users to Google's e-mail and office productivity products by the end of December 2009.

Yesterday we wrote about Novell losijng the ACCC as a customer. Here is another report about Novell being dumped.

The ACCC has 790 users with 888,000 documents in the TRIM repository, and over 4.6 million MS Office documents on Novell file and print servers around the country. These servers will be decommissioned as part of the centralisation process. Once the new interface is deployed, all documents will be lodged and searched through TRIM to the central platform housed in Canberra, thereby removing the need for personal or network drives.

Like all companies, Novell will pretend it's business as usual. Fair enough, everyone's doing it. But to assume Novell is a safe long-term bet is not so smart. ⬆

Comments

zatoichi

2009-08-01 18:30:36

It's interesting to me how Roy slants the "Groupwise" story. In fact, it's not nearly the slamdunk that Roy would seem to like to think it is that Google will get the City of Los Angeles business: serious, and quite legitimate, concerns about security and privacy have been raised by a number of stakeholders:

The migration would make Google, which hosts the servers running the applications, responsible for retaining and protecting sensitive health care and litigation data along with criminal and drug investigation records. Since the plan was proposed, critics from various organizations, including the Los Angeles Police Department, the city attorney's office and public interest groups have raised questions about the privacy and security implications of storing sensitive data in the cloud for access via the public Internet. The concerns received a fresh airing following the recent Twitter Inc. security breach caused by an attacker gaining access to a worker's e-mail on the Gmail system hosted by Google.

Roy's happy, I guess, to sacrifice security and privacy as long as it hurts Novell. Luckily, the LAPD, the LA city attorney, and a lot of other people show better sense.
JohnD

2009-08-02 05:28:57

Nice job linking back to your own stories and completely ignoring the profit posted last quarter in addition to the debt buy back that ran from 6/15 to 7/14. I'm guessing we'll find out how much debt is left during the next quarterly report. Of course instead of looking at Novell canceling a meeting as a smart business move, you view it as a sign of their demise. I enjoyed your creative "editing" of the LA story too.

zatoichi

2009-08-02 13:35:12

All the News That's Fit to Misrepresent!

Novell Drops Another Event and Loses Major Contract with City of Los Angeles

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