Novell's portfolio fails to survive

Summary: A roundup of December stories where companies or institutions dump Novell and also make it known

THE tracking of Novell's demise is made hard by the fact that it went private. It is also made hard by the fact that companies which dump Novell need not make it publicly known. But we do our best to collect anecdotal evidence and this post will supply some.

Here is an article from December that says:

The new Active Directory, which took the place of Novell to store network accounts, became visible this year. Users now log on to campus computers using an Active Directory account and their Netpass username and password.

Here is another one:

The much-maligned Novell GroupWise e-mail program may soon become a thing of Smith's past: ITS is considering switching to the Google Apps for Education platform. Smith has used GroupWise since September 2000, though over the years many students have expressed dissatisfaction with the program's organizational system and size limitations.

Here is a massive loss for Novell:

The council is replacing Novell's Groupwise collaboration tool and Microsoft's word processing and spreadsheet software for its 3,500 staff, it said in a statement. The switch is expected to save the council £3 million over the next four years.

They are getting rid of GroupWise:

Research by the council's IT department earlier this year found two viable options for the shift: Microsoft Office 365 and Google. A tender was put out in July to find a company to help migrate the council from its current Novell GroupWise system to one of those two solutions, including supplying licensing, and the winner was the London-based Google reseller Cloudreach.

In LA, after a fuss was made, it turns out that:

Google will pay up to $350,000 per year for those employees to use that system, which is run by Novell, a competitor.

It took a lot of smears against Google to achieve this. Proprietary Groupwise is not necessarily more privacy-respecting than Google. They ought to just deploy Free software, instead. Here is more background information [1, 2], which meets the chagrin of Microsoft boosters. It should not be about security because proprietary software that is native has security problems too. Anyway, it may be too late to reverse this decision. Groupwise might live another day in LA. As for Novell's other proprietary software, one article says that in provisioning "Key vendors dominating this market space include Oracle Corp., IBM Corp., CA Technologies, and Novell Inc." How long for? Attachmate is too passive. Regarding proprietary identity management, Novell is mentioned here. Remember that Attachmate does not promote Novell products, so those pieces of software are in a terminal state right now. Quoting one last new article:

Licensing revenues are also derived from arrangements in which we enable third party technology, such as solutions from Novell, to be used with our OEM partners' products.

At Novell, proprietary software is what everything is about, except the incubation known as OpenSUSE. â–ˆ