Summary: GroupWise market share erodes at a high pace, based on the news

SEVERAL MONTHS after Novell had lost its contract in LA and in other key places it apparently also lost Colorado county. From Independence Day:

The process of migrating data has been under way for a few weeks. When employees return to work on Tuesday after the long weekend, their e-mail and calendaring will no longer be on a Novell GroupWise client, but on Google Apps.

Well, another new article suggests that this is part of a trend:

The BKS Group had moved its 650 e-mail users from Novell's GroupWise to Microsoft Exchange Server during 2007, and was finding the built-in security not up to the task. The team has the mammoth duty of supporting as many as 350 mobile users at any one time, either travelling, or based on-site for large projects. This mobility posed additional e-mail availability issues. Off-site staff were either connecting in via fixed-line VPN from the site network, or dialling up via 3G mobile connections to a dedicated BKS Group access point (APN).

Another new story shows GroupWise being abandoned.

Rentokil decided to move its email system to the cloud last year, moving from 35 different email products, including Novell GroupWise and Microsoft Exchange, 80 systems and 180 domains. It chose Google’s solution after a six-month trial with 700 users across the company in March 2009.

As time goes by, the value of Novell will probably continue to decline. The latest reports suggest that VMware is looking for another company to acquire and that company might be Novell, based on rumours. Meanwhile however, VMware's parent company just buys Greenplum [1, 2, 3], which used to falsely advertise itself as "open source" because it uses some:

Greenplum, which uses the open source PostgreSQL database as a base for its data warehousing and business intelligence software, has been acquired by storage company EMC.

Who will buy Novell? ⬆