Summary: Novell GroupWise is being abandoned and removed from over 70,000 seats

NOVELL got dumped by the city of Los Angeles late last year [1, 2, 3, 4]. It was decided that Novell GroupWise did not deliver and the decision is further defended in this new article.

When the city picked Google's productivity tools along with its popular e-mail service Gmail, what initially was thought to be a run-of-the-mill IT project quickly morphed into something bigger and more complex. The decision stoked a period of intense lobbying from L.A.'s existing e-mail provider (Novell) and Google's biggest competitor (Microsoft), rivals who likely saw the city's decision to adopt Google's hosted services as something that could potentially crack the state and local government market's inertia when it comes to cloud computing.

This massive departure from Novell GroupWise could catalyse more of its kind and indeed, based on the following two reports from Australia, this is already happening. ITWire says:

Macquarie is currently in the process of dumping its in-house Novell GroupWise email infrastructure and moving 6,000 staff to Google’s Gmail platform; a move that comes after the university already shifted some 68,000 students into Google’s cloud.

More here:

It's a perfect storm: Google's cloud email is reaching reliability and manageability levels that Microsoft, IBM and Novell can't keep up with, say big Aussie organisations.

What's funny is that Google is headed by the former CEO of Novell. He is hitting Novell where it hurts these days, but Novell is reciprocating (doing the same thing) by helping Microsoft, the company which is most viciously attacking Google and attacking GNU/Linux. Where does that position Novell as far as GNU/Linux is concerned? ⬆