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Summary: A lot of Novell news, mostly minor

THERE is a large number of items to go through today, but none is particularly important. We start with the Novell-SCO case.

SCO

A settlement with AutoZone is foreseen, but Novell will continue its UNIX battles with SCO.

SCO Group Inc. the bankrupt software developer that claims to own copyrights to the Unix operating system, will pursue its lawsuits against Novell Inc. and International Business Machines Corp., a court-appointed trustee for SCO said Friday.

Trustee Edward N. Cahn, a retired federal judge who mediates patent disputes, made his announcement in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Delaware.

This was also covered here. From a mixed article we have:

For years, SCO's been pursuing lawsuits against major vendors like IBM and Novell (Nasdaq: NOVL). It seems that's all the company is really about anymore -- trying to sue Linux out of existence. It's not working out all that well for it, though. It's currently trying to emerge from bankruptcy, and getting rid of a handful of employees -- including McBride -- plus selling off a bunch of assets is all part of its plan to get its head above water.

John Fontana of IDG wrote about Novell's Supreme Court petition, which was covered in the British press as well:

The Inquirer: Novell will appeal the SCO case to the US Supreme Court

Novell's lawyers then go on to provide a raft of previous case law that contradict the 10th Circuit's ruling in SCO v. Novell.

The Register: Novell aims SCO tussle at the Supremes

Novell wants the US Supreme Court to review its seemingly-never-ending legal tete-a-tete with SCO over the famous UNIX and UNIXware copyrights.

All the British sources are pointing to Groklaw, which adds:

To tell you the truth, I wish Groklaw could file an amicus brief. I'm very satisfied that Novell is taking this step. I didn't see how they could not do it, after reading the ruling and the subsequent denial of reconsideration. The issue is much bigger than just SCO v. Novell, and it needs to be resolved, so everyone knows what the law is, regardless of where in the US one resides. You really can't have one federal law that is interpreted in wildly different ways depending on which circuit you happen to live in.

Also from Groklaw:

Novell is running this race now with a ball and chain on its leg, and when they asked to be allowed to run without it, they were denied within 24 hours of their petition being filed. Prontissimo.

As an update on the AutoZone case, Groklaw writes:

Just to keep you in the loop, there is an update in the AutoZone docket, a note rescheduling oral argument on AutoZone's motion to dismiss in part SCO's claims for damages. It will now be held on December 7 at 10 AM. Except of course that it probably won't, since the parties -- SCO's Chapter 11 Trustee Edward Cahn for SCO and AutoZone -- have stipulated to a resolution of the litigation in toto.

Finance

Novell was mentioned almost nowhere in a financial context, except here maybe and also in a partner site of Microsoft. From the original:

In stark mathematical terms, this means capital allocation laggards such as Novell (Nasdaq: NOVL) and JetBlue Airways (Nasdaq: JBLU) ought to be paying dividends to their shareholders. Neither company has returned even 4% on available capital over the prior 12 months.

Virtualisation

The press in Sri Lanka did a weird little piece that smells more like an advert for Novell.

A global software corporation, Novell, Inc. has now focused its attention to the Sri Lankan corporate market with the aim of promoting a cost benefit disaster recovery system now in high demand in the European and Australian markets.

In the context of Xen, Novell's SUSE was mentioned throughout this article.

The conventional wisdom is that VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V have run away with the virtualization market. But IT professionals who use commercial Xen-based virtualization options defend their choice on the basis of conserving precious IT budget as well as functionality.

[...]

Jubic said the department opted to go with Novell SUSE Xen based on the strong relationship with its Novell primary support engineer. "I don't think there was anything extremely special about it apart from the service I get from them," he said.

Novell's PlateSpin takeover became part of this discussion in the Montreal Gazette because PlateSpin was a Canadian company before Novell put it to waste.

Yet the deals the Canadian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association points to as its best examples of success have largely consisted of companies that were sold to foreign corporations - such as Quebec-based ViroChem Pharma, sold to Vertex Pharmaceuticals in the U.S., B.C.-based Aspreva Pharmaceuticals, sold to Galenica Group in Switzerland, Ontario-based PlateSpin Ltd., sold to Novell Inc. in the U.S., and Ontario-based Q9 Solutions, sold to Abry Partners, a U.S. private equity firm.

Mail and Collaboration

Apart from the news about Los Angeles, little of anything of significance happened to GroupWise; there was this Sonian announcement which got some press.

According to its Tuesday announcement, the Sonian Archive Service provides "an affordable, scalable, reliable, secure and feature-rich hosted email archiving and e-discovery service" to Novell GroupWise users of all sizes. Also, tight integration between hosted service and GroupWise ensures compliance with all government regulations, full archive management for both GroupWise administrators and ready end-user access.

A Novell-oriented Web site wrote about this and passed around a success story too. TMCnet pretended to have written an article, which was just the press release redone. Shame on TMCnet for doing this so regularly.

Here is another new mention of GroupWise in the British press.

Other Office alternatives worth evaluating include Novell GroupWise; Corel WordPerfect Office, which has found a niche in legal circles; and IBM Lotus Symphony, which is also based on OpenOffice.

The Australian press revealed another pending loss for GroupWise.

This will be completed alongside the rollout of a standard operating environment across desktops and a project to replace the agency's Novell Groupwise messaging system with Microsoft Exchange.

GroupWise support was also mentioned in relation to the BlackBerry, even in new reference pages. A press release about Novell Teaming (also here) targets educational institutions now.

Security

Novell's proprietary products for business security are alluded to in Windows sites and others.

Novell tool to secure data and workloads in the cloud Rather than enter the cloud computing market with guns blazing, enterprise software maker Novell is producing annexation technology tools that will shelter the cloud within the data center during processing and provide added security.

Novell's products in this area are also mentioned very briefly in this pair of articles.

Novell's single sign-on worked so well at Hartford Hospital, it scared some

 

The security log management market is seeing a meteoric rise, with household names such as Juniper Networks, Novell, EMC and IBM all battling for space alongside smaller specialist companies. Most of the larger players have grown by acquisition, as in Novell's purchase of eSentry. Several have opted to license SIEM technology, such as HP's appliance that uses SenSage, and Juniper Networks' Security Threat Response Manager that incorporates QRadar. Microsoft also has a range of products in the field.

eDirectory gets more support from Lieberman Software:

Lieberman Software announced that its privileged identity management solution is certified in the Novell Ready Application compatibility Program for Novell eDirectory.

The press release is almost identical to the above. It says:

Lieberman Software announced today that its flagship privileged identity management solution is certified in the Novell Ready Application compatibility Program for Novell eDirectory.

On NDS/eDirectory:

The OneSign database synchronises with a directory server and support includes NT Domain, Active Directory and Novell NDS/eDirectory. OneSign supports multiple authentication methods, including ID tokens and fingerprint scanners, and can function as a Radius server for authenticating remote users.

Last week we showed that Novell was using FUD to sell its security products and there is more coverage of this now, mostly the spreading of more fear.

According to Grant Ho, senior solutions manager for endpoint management solutions at Novell (www.novell.com), change and configuration management tools can be helpful for creating policies that specify the data that can be automatically backed up.

"Poor data protection in the UK," Novell claims in order to sell its 'medicine'.

The Threat Assessment survey from Novell reveals that 71pc of companies said they don’t encrypt data on laptops, while 73pc of companies don’t encrypt data on removable storage devices, exposing the company to significant risk if these devices are lost or stolen.

More here:

In an effort to help IT departments evaluate and better secure their network endpoints, such as desktops, notebooks, smartphones, MP3 players and thumb drives, Novell has released initial results from its Threat Assessment survey, says Reuters.

"Says Reuters" is not true. It's just a press release, so it ought to state "says Novell".

Watch how similar the text above is to the following. Signs of plagiarism somewhere.

In an effort to help IT departments evaluate and better secure their network endpoints, such as desktops, notebooks, smart phones, MP3 players and thumb drives, Novell today announced initial results from its Threat Assessment survey which show that many enterprises are still highly vulnerable to preventable security threats.

People

A former CEO of Novell can be found in the following new press release. [via Reuters]

Co-Founded in 2005 by Julian Hyde, architect of the open source Mondrian OLAP engine, SQLstream's investors and advisors include Bob Frankenberg, former CEO of Novell and current Board Member at National Semiconductor...

Another former CEO of Novell, who is now the CEO of Google, would obviously be Eric Schmidt. His role at Novell is mentioned in The New York Times (with a typo).

Before taking over as chief executive of Google, Eric Schmidt battled Microsoft at Novel and Sun, and he has long put a high priority on making sure Google is never vulnerable to excess power in Redmond.

More of the same here:

Let’s start with the obvious. At the Gartner Symposium conference this week, Google CEO Eric Schmidt — a veteran of Sun Microsystems and Novell — said the enterprise push represents “the next big billion dollar business after the new display (advertising) business.” Schmidt also sat down with CNet to further describe Google’s enterprise strategy.

Schmidt has just visited a familiar place where many of his employees used to be when he headed Novell.

Google CEO Visits Utah

[...]

Schmidt came to Salt Lake City to make the keynote address to the Utah Technology Council's Hall of Fame Ceremony. From 1997 to 2001, Schmidt served as CEO to Utah-based Novell corporation.

Also from Utah comes this report, which indicates that Novell sort of hosts the Utah Hall of Fame.

The induction ceremony is set for 6:30 p.m. Nov. 14 at Novell Building A.

Utah and Novell in the news again:

“I think in a lot of ways it really is better,” said Karla Weinsenburger, Provo, Utah-based risk manager of software provider Novell Inc. “In the beginning, the treasurer was very antsy about purchasing coming in. There was some fear of them taking over because purchasing is used to looking at a contract and negotiating a contract, and you really can't negotiate insurance policies like that,” she said. “I feel like the purchasing relationship within Novell's structure has worked really well, but I think it's really important going in that purchasing is to help with what they do well, which is sending out RFPs, gathering data, populating spreadsheets...and they give us the decision-making ability and also the ability to say, "That's just not the way it works in insurance, sorry.'”

In Jordan we have this former Novell Senior Vice President mentioned as follows:

Mr. Khauli has previously held a number of positions in the US, including Senior Vice President of Operations at Novell USA and a spell at the USDOD (United States Department of Defense) concentrating on the development of the Class 3 Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). During his career, Mr. Khauli led several research teams from various foremost companies and universities in the US, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Partners

Novell's relationship with SAP may be old news, but new press releases continue to show its impact. This is also mentioned in some articles and Novell-oriented Web sites.

SAP has announced collaborations with a variety of companies, including Novell and Hewlett-Packard, to push out its platforms and functionality.

Here is a case of Novell ZENworks support, as seen in the following LiveTime press release.

LiveTime's Federated Configuration Management Database includes out-of-the-box integrations to 12 Asset Management systems including Novell ZENworks 10, Microsoft SCCM 2007, Loginventory 5 and LANrev 5.

Cisco's relationship with Novell, of which there's not much, can be seen in this article and as one company goes out of business, it turns out that Novell was its partner.

Comsys was formed in 1999 and provided managed services, project scoping, project delivery, infrastructure design, implementation, customised solutions and training. Vendor partners included Microsoft, Symantec, Dell, IBM, VMware, EMC and Novell.

Novell was mentioned in several press releases of other companies it works with. There is also this:

The most common hardware, systems, and applications that enterprises use today are produced by Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, Sun, Novell, and IBM.

Marketing

Novell uploaded this "success story" to YouTube about a week ago. The company is trying to keep up appearances. Novell still insists that BrainShare won't be called off again. This time ITWire writes about it.

In December last year, Novell took the unprecedented step of cancelling the BrainShare conference scheduled to have taken place in March 2009. 'Unprecedented' as this was the first time it had failed to run in its 23-year history.

As claimed in previous weeks/months, BrainShare will either be significantly downsized or simply cancelled again. It is unlikely that Novell can reproduce past glory because it's a shrinking company with a shrinking userbase. Either way, GWAVA is keeping GWAVACon alive.

Here is a new article about Novell's younger days

The fastest rocket ship of today’s software industry was Novell. Novell (NASD: NOVL) was one impressive company. It took only three years to reach $50 million after it was founded in 1983. In 2008 it still pulled in almost $1 billion in revenue.

These are exaggerated numbers and they are going downwards very fast. Novell's CMO, John Dragoon, keeps his hopes alive using Forbes and The Var Guy, who is Dragoon's friend in some ways, gives his article a little boost.

Miscellany

On the channel side, in India, CRN wrote about Novell the following:

Software solutions also are perceived as a potential area of interest to VADs. Novell had roped in Inflow as a distributor to address and develop their tier-2 channels. Similarly M.Tech signed on Solarwinds, a network management software vendor and has been a strong partner of Citrix’s application virtualization software. However not all software solutions can be sold through the value added distribution model feels Unnikrishnan.

Lastly, for the first time in a very long time, Jeff Jaffe published some more strategic fluff. ⬆