Summary: With significant departures of a top manager, channel chief, and more key staff, Novell's future in the UK does not look promising

AS SHOWN earlier, Novell is doing badly. The stock is down by over 7% today.

In the UK and Ireland, Novell is doing even worse. Rather radical changes are being made because the channel is broken, the Channel Chief has just left, and there are other major losses in this region, mostly staff-wise.

Novell's former channel partner is now coming out, then publicly swinging. This looks bad for Novell. To quote some portions from The Register:

Computer 2000 has slammed Novell by labelling the software maker as “not channel-friendly”.

[...]

He said customers weren’t really chasing the software maker’s products. Reed claimed Novell “lacked resources and marketing funds” and was “vastly over-distributed” even as its business has “repeatedly shrunk over the past decade.”

[...]

A spokeswoman at the vendor told us on Wednesday that Novell had in fact reduced its total number of UK distributors by 25 per cent since 1 January 2009, chiming with Reed’s comment that the firm simply had too many disties on its books.

Down under in New Zealand, Inland Revenue may be replacing Novell as well.

This will include creating an infrastructure for Microsoft based file, print and messaging services and migrating from a Windows 2000 desktop system to XP.

It may also include migrating systems from Novell Netware file, print and messaging services to the Windows environment.

This happens to show just how much Vista is being avoided. In New Zealand authorities, they are now 'upgrading' to an operating system from 2001. They should really look at modern operating systems other than Windows. About a week ago, Inland Revenue was rumoured to be considering desktop GNU/Linux. What happened to that? This presentation offers some possibilities because therein Microsoft admits using cronies and bribing for contracts/accounts. ⬆

"I feel we are much too smug in dealing with Novell. Perhaps they didn’t hurt us in DOS yet — but it’s not because of product or their trying. It’s because we already had the OEMs wrapped up."

--Jim Allchin, President of Platforms & Services Division at Microsoft