Summary: Different bits of news about Novell, including what appears like an imminent sale of the company

WE are gradually accumulating more reports as evidence of Novell growing irrelevance (it's up for sale). Here are some of the latest reports about Novell's situation.

Networking software maker Novell Inc. said Thursday its fiscal second-quarter profit climbed, helped by lower operating costs even as revenue declined.

For the three months ended April 30, the company earned $19.9 million, or 6 cents per share, up 28 percent from $15.6 million, or 5 cents per share, in the same period a year earlier.

The headline from the Toronto Star says that "Novell's Status Remains Uncertain" and news about Novell's stock is not especially positive [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30]. Here we have a former Novell employee in a court case and a new press release reveals Novell influence in the Utah Technology Council:

Dave Cutler (photo), VP global technical support of Novell. He has made improvements to all aspects of technical support & built new centers in India & Prague. Under Cutler, Novell Support Centers became SCP certified in 2005 and won the 2007 HDI "Team Excellence" award.

[...]

Chris Stone (photo), managing director of Epic Ventures. CEO & founder of several companies, he was a key part of Novell’s resurgence. With more than 29 years of public and private technology company operational and entrepreneurial experience from engineering to executive management, he has been named a top 10 entrepreneur by Red Herring and one of The Top 50 People in High Tech by Ziff Davis.

Justin Puryear, a Microsoft apologist, is promoting Novell as a GNU/Linux distributor, but he faces opposition to the idea. To give one example from the comments: "Is this really a smart article to publish with the unsolicited offers to purchase Novell? How much longer will they be around?"

The Register also jumps to hasty conclusions, extrapolating some remarks from Red Hat as if to mean that Red Hat considers buying Novell.

Red Hat's CEO Jim Whitehurst declined to dismiss the possibility of buying out his company's Linux rival Novell in a meeting with reporters in London today.

Here are some new examples where both Novell's SUSE or Red Hat are supported:

i. SGI ships out first complete Altix UV 1000 Systems

Built on open standard technologies from Intel Xeon series 7500 processors to Linux, Altix UV system's x86 architecture supports out of the box Novell SUSE or Red Hat Linux operating systems.

ii. Smaller and faster data center gear in Hamburg

The x86 system is based on Intel Xeon series 7500 processors and supports Novell, SUSE or Red Hat Linux operating systems.

According to some pundits, IBM wants to keep competition going in the RPM-based GNU/Linux servers market in order to keep the operating system's price down. The thing about Novell is, only a small portion of its business has anything to do with SUSE. Here is another item from the news:

Dimdim recently announced that it is working with Novell (News - Alert) to power a new Novell Conferencing solution.

Here is Novell being replaced by Microsoft (Novell is used to this type of treatment, but it collaborates with Microsoft anyway):

Over 400 computers had been replaced, servers had been changed from Novell to Windows systems, laptop labs had been introduced in the high school, and major repairs were now being carried out in house by department staff, rather than contracted out, in a move that had saved the district money.

Last week we wrote about Novell's IWM, which is mentioned this week in:

• Novell Focuses on IWM Strategies



• Novell unveils new versions of Workload Management solutions



• Novell Offers PlateSpin Solutions for Microsoft Windows and Linux



• Novell unveils new PlateSpin Workload Management products



• Stock Updates from CRWE Wallstreet. VSYM.OB, NOVL, VDSI, NSSC, WPO

This news happens to have been mentioned along with Novell's helping hand to Microsoft in HPC. More new coverage about this includes:

• Microsoft and Novell report strong HPC demand



• Microsoft News - Microsoft and Novell Come Together to Hybrid Options for High-Performance Computing



• Microsoft and Novell Collaborate to Deliver Hybrid Options for High-Performance Computing

Novell is too Microsoft dependent and it shows. Any buyer of Novell would need to be Microsoft friendly or least Microsoft tolerant. ⬆