EXCEPT for many articles about the SCO case, Novell hardly appeared in the news. There's this one new case study and also an analytical report of many companies that include Novell:
*The report covers the following IT systems management vendors: BMC, CA, EMC, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Novell and Symantec.
Elliott Associates, the hedge fund that’s seeking to acquire Novell and SUSE Linux, is denying a report that it plans to break up Novell and sell off the pieces. Hmmm… But The VAR Guy still wonders: Will Novell and Elliott Associates reach a buyout agreement in time for Novell BrainShare — a big customer and partner that starts March 21? Here’s some speculation.
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The VAR Guy has also wondered if a white knight — IBM, HP, Microsoft, Oracle, or CA Inc. — would emerge to buy Novell. But the best potential fit on that list — CA, which has a bunch of security and system management synergies with Novell — seems to be out of the running, The VAR Guy believes.
The reason: CA just opened its wallet to acquire Nimsoft, the managed services software provider, for $350 million. The VAR Guy doubts CA would open its wallet even wider only a few days later to buy Novell.
Jarrad Zalkin, a vice-president at investment bank TM Capital who works on technology deals, says he believes McDermott and Snabe will follow through. He says Novell (NOVL) and privately held SAS Institute are among potential targets for SAP. McDermott and Snabe didn't say which companies might pique SAP's interest.
Novell, Inc. (NASDAQ:NOVL) also fell 1.38% to close at $5.72 on 14.82 million shares. The stock is up over 55% in the last one year of trading sessions.
Novell, Inc. (NASDAQ:NOVL) climbed 0.87% over its previous day’s price and now trades at $5.77. The stock has a 52-week range of $3.52-$6.15. So far in this year the stock went up over 39%.
MFE peer Novell Inc. (NOVL) has seen a 19.42% stock price gain over about the last month, while another peer, Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. (CHKP) saw a 6.14% gain. So with a return of 11.30%, McAfee, Inc. saw less price gain than NOVL and beat CHKP’s price performance over the last month.
Granted, not all of the announced deals will get closed (Upek’s unsolicited bid for publicly traded rival AuthenTec (AUTH) comes to mind), and not all of the bids will play out smoothly (the hedge fund agitation against Novell (NOVL), for instance), but it does indicate a rebound in activity from this time last year.
Bannan said Novell was no longer continuing to develop the platform.
Just how much NetWare, which saw its last major update seven years ago, is out there? "A ton," said Adam Gray, CTO of Novacoast, a Santa Barbara, Calif., IT specialist with a strong Linux and open source focus.
Talking about SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10/11, Mishra asserted that it has best in class RAS features, can host most popular ISV products, comes with a Virtual Machine Driver Pack, provides enhanced application security using AppArmor, network detection, monitoring, and filtering, comes with certified workloads like SAP and Oracle, and has Active Directory integration, migration tools for UNIX/Windows amongst other features.
I haven’t had a chance to speak with anyone from Novell in a while. Dipto Chakravarty, Novell’s General Manager, Cloud Security, and VP WW Engineering, reached out to me and after a rousing game of calendar alignment, we spoke about the Cloud Security Alliance, its goals and how it plans to go about achieving those goals.
So what's the next step? Let's move those servers to the cloud so we only need them when they are running applications. Let's move the work to where it is cheapest and easiest to perform. Justin Steinman, vice president of solution and product marketing at Novell, calls this vision Intelligent Workload Management, but here's where the challenges start to surface.
Novell today announced the availability of a hosted version of Novell Conferencing. This new conferencing solution enables users to conduct virtual meetings, demos and Webinars using a Web browser. With this Web conferencing technology, organizations can significantly reduce the cost and time required for face-to-face travel by instantly sharing documents, desktops, applications, Web pages, whiteboards, audio, video-even record meetings-without installing any software.
There are other standard and open source identity efforts like Project Higgins (backed by IBM and Novell) and Microsoft's recently announced U-Prove technology. Now that Google is on board with OpenID, I hope we can start to merge these efforts and get the most out of each.
Other industry players have also made recent moves to beef up cloud security. The Cloud Security Alliance and Novell announced on March 1 a certification, education and outreach program targeted at cloud providers.
Already, Novell has teamed up with the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) to give a secure seal of approval to cloud solutions; McAfee this week unveiled its cloud security assessment program, dubbed the McAfee Cloud Secure program; and CompTIA offers a security best practices program in its CompTIA Security Trustmark, which can be applied to cloud computing.
Mr Burton has played a leadership role in the development of US technology policy for over twenty years. Prior to joining salesforce.com in January 2006, he was Vice President of Government Affairs for Entrust (2000-2005) and Vice President for Government Relations for Novell (1995-2000). Previously, he was President of the Council on Competitiveness where he was a pioneer in the effort to establish government technology policies for the US high-tech industry.
Novell has announced that ‘the Novell India Partner Academy, a training programme for Novell’s partners in selling, distributing and supporting of Novell’s suite of enterprise IT solutions, held for the first time in Colombo, was a major success. Novell partners graduating from the training will be able to provide pre-sales consulting and professional services, post-sales support and training to their customers.
Attendees at next week's BrainShare conference will be the first to get access to the beta preview version of Pulse, which Novell plans to launch in final form in the second half of this year.