The US is in the midst of an insurance industry push towards electronic medical records. Tax breaks and other incentives have been offered to doctors who make the move to electronic records keeping. This will be good if adequate protections are in place.

The privacy of electronic records is supposed to be protected by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, but there are obvious and gaping problems. Frequently raised concerns include nosy clerks especially at satellite institutions like pharmacies, unauthorized remote intrusion, court orders and a lack of action by regulators who take complaints. Mostly overlooked is the fact that software owners like Microsoft will have unfettered access to any medical record that any Windows system has access to. Google recently proved that Microsoft was spying on ordinary users, so the threat is no longer a theoretical matter of the company exercising the broad rights to snoop they gave themselves in their EULAs a decade ago [2] with or without your permission.

Every business and government office that uses non free software should realize this threat and end it by migrating to free software. Moving to free software won’t protect institutions from malicious clerks and other commonly mentioned problems but it is the only solution to unauthorized access to records by software owners. That access and power is at the heart of the bad deal propitiatory software has always offered but is exposed in an ugly way when all of our records are electronic and computers must be on a network to be considered useful.

Businesses that do not move out of customer and self interest should be forced by law. Customers and citizens concerned about their privacy should be protected. Because no such privacy can be guaranteed by propitiatory software, no propitiatory software should be allowed to operate on customer business records. Only software with the four software freedoms should be allowed.

Summary: Novell’s Identity Access Management business is also at risk

BASED on what we learned in IRC from people whose job it is to sell/maintain Novell deployments, customers of Novell may soon rush to other companies like Microsoft, just because of the uncertainty around AttachMSFT [sic]. Novell’s financial results were already expected to be bad, but now it is going to be even worse because the Novell brand is likely to become history after decades out there in the market. Despite brand recognition, Identity Access Management is only one of Novell’s wannabe products these days and patents associated with it are being passed to a Microsoft shell. Novell’s PR people desperately try to create interest in Novell’s Identity Management [1, 2] and there is even a new press release in many sites [1, 2, 3]. It failed to generate news coverage and all we could find is this tiny mention. Given the tiny impact Novell’s Identity Management has had, is it likely that AttachMSFT will choose to keep it? Can such an asset be sold at all? It’s just proprietary software without a major userbase or any patents at all (Novell values patents). █

Summary: Novell lost its identity as a “Linux vendor” and the news shows reluctance to do anything to change this

NOVELL HAS had virtually no news to tell this week, the only exception being a press release about Identity Manager 4. At this stage, Novell is just floating, waiting to be acquired (that’s what probably occupies the management right now). Based on this week’s financial news about NOVL [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16], there have been no major shifts. News about Novell was very scarce and casual mentionings of the company were made in light of historical things like Novell’s IPX:

PCs with documents to fax often “spoke” to their servers over proprietary protocols (eg: Novell’s IPX) and telephone carriers were the most common intermediary between those and other servers (and fax machines as well).

More about Novell’s past:

Microsoft on Wednesday reached a deal with New York City to supply software directly to local government but which avoids the controversial practices of earlier years.

[...]

Unbundling is a rare step for Microsoft, which has usually preferred mandatory licenses for its software whenever making a deal. The strategy helped marginalize Corel/Novell WordPerfect over the past two decades and also sparked some antitrust concerns, especially when Microsoft charged a per-computer Windows license even for systems that didn’t have Windows installed.

The Economist ponders verbing Novell like people have verbed “Google” and this one article from the Middle East says something odd:

Novell, the leader in Intelligent Workload Management (identity)…

The thing about Novell’s “Intelligent Workload Management” (not identity) is that it owns it, so it’s not the “leader” in it. Some other new articles from the Middle East cover similar grounds [1, 2]. Novell tries growing its market there. It is mostly about proprietary software though, as articles name Identity Manager 4 and WorkloadIQ. Novell has been spreading self-promotional/self-serving ‘studies’ recently and these are being used to market Fog Computing, which Novell wishes to control using proprietary software like WorkloadIQ.

Another piece of proprietary software from Novell is GroupWise and this one too received some coverage this week, even though it was very minor, e.g. [1, 2, 3, 4]. GWAVA announced a keynote speaker for GWAVACon. Additionally, “LiveTime and Novell Announce the Launch of Novell Service Desk Software” says this item:

LiveTime Software, a California-based provider of Web, Software-as-a-Service, cloud-based ITIL 3 Service Management, and Service Desk software, announced a partnership with Novell, for worldwide distribution of LiveTime as Novell Service Desk.

Novell’s marketing type Grant Ho has just had a placement at ZDNet. It’s for identity management, which Novell has a new release of [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. Novell’s identity management bags this new partner:

Arrow Enterprise Computing Solutions (ECS) has deepened its relationship with Novell by bagging distribution rights to the software vendor’s identity and security line-up.

People with history at Novell are being mentioned in some releases and articles this week, for example:

Bradford served as CEO of Fusion-io and was senior vice president of Novell. He is now chairman of Fusion-io’s board, “giving me a little more time for LDS.biz.”

Lastly, Novell was mentioned in the following couple of items (minor significance):

i. HP ExpertONE Targets Cisco Training with New Certifications

They never mention Cisco by name, but it does seem a little late to be targeting Novell CNEs as a major source of pre-trained candidates.

ii. Swicon360 set to shine as Silver sponsor at Saphila Conference

Swicon360, in association with partners Vodacom Business and Novell, will be represented as a Silver sponsor at the event, which is co-hosted by The African SAP User Group and SAP South Africa.

Up to a point this year we were publishing Novell news on a weekly basis. News about Novell has become very scarce though, so we stopped. The company is now on the verge of being no more and given its focus on proprietary software, a takeover won’t be loss to FOSS. In some ways it will help demote/eliminate a distribution which Microsoft unfairly extracts revenue from (dubbed “Ballnux”). █

Summary: A bundle of Novell news emphasising the company’s Fog Computing (‘cloud’) moves, former Novell staff, and space sharing (amid the company’s shrinkage and approaching end)

THIS post accumulates one week of Novell news, excluding the imminent sale of the company. Earlier this month Novell or some surrogate account threw some “success stories” at YouTube [1, 2]. It’s not entirely clear why Novell should even bother marketing itself at this stage.

Moving on to SUSE (probably to become VMware’s property soon), SUSE received a special mention in the following press release some days ago:

Zend Server Supports SUSE Linux Enterprise Server

[..]

Zend Technologies Updates Zend Server PHP Web Application Server and Zend Server Cluster Manager

Another item says that “Novell Announces New SUSE Linux Certification Programmes” (probably old news reposted) and there is some news about Packman in SLE*:

The Packman software archive is now offering a multimedia software package for SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 (SP1). As well as a range of media players, including VLC and MPlayer, it includes a number of codecs for proprietary formats. These include a Windows Media codec package and several GStreamer plug-ins which can be used by applications such as Totem, Banshee and Rhythmbox.

There is little about OpenSUSE except some security alerts [1, 2]. As a takeover by VMware seems highly likely, Novell continues to promote its proprietary Fog Computing agenda with Cloud Manager, which received belated coverage from [1, 2, 3]. There’s a quiet new release of another proprietary software product from Novell.

“Swicon360 takes HCM Spectrum in the Cloud service online” says this new press release about an adoption by a site which “represents a key step in an industry-leading initiative involving the joint expertise of Swicon360, SAP, Vodacom Business and Novell.”

Novell is increasingly moving in the direction of Fog Computing, as we have stressed and demonstrated for months. The article “Cloud Computing Investors Need to Consider Architecture” says

BasisOne is using Novell identity and security solutions for its platform that deploys SAP ERP solutions as a service using Vodacom (News – Alert) Business’s private cloud, TMCnet reported. Novell’s solution enables BasisOne to extend an enterprise organization’s security policies onto the applications that are running on virtual servers at Vodacom Business’s state-of-the-art data center.

Novell has not bought a single company in a long time, but memories are brought back about one company which sold identity management to Novell a long time ago:

“It’s a great asset, a market-leading company,” says Jon Oltsik, an analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group. He notes ArcSight’s main competitors today include RSA with its enVision product, as well as vendors Q1 Labs, LogLogic and LogRhythm. Oltsik admits he was a bit surprised to see HP going out to snag ArcSight since HP has not built up a large security product portfolio and has at times divested products, such as its identity management suite, which it sold to Novell.

Elsewhere in the news we found Novell partners but no key announcements of any kind. Here is Novell plugging itself into an IDG report:

Mary Jo Swenson, a manager with Novell Training Services, says her company “looks for someone who knows the technology and can present well.” To ensure a trainer meets those criteria, Novell wants him to be a Certified Novell Instructor, or better yet, an Advanced Certified Novell Instructor with significant hands-on product experience. The instructor must hold the certification for the course he is teaching, and must stay current on Novell product knowledge. He can lose his status as a trainer if he doesn’t stay current on Novell products. Swenson says the trainer also should hold the Certified Technical Trainer (CTT+) certification, which validates that the person can perform classroom management duties and handle the “teaching” portion of being a trainer.

Former staff of Novell gets mentioned here:

Microfueler was founded in 2008, and has 25 employees. It’s based in Paso Robles, Calif., and is founded by Tom Quinn, who invented and holds the patent for the motion-game controller used by the Nintendo Wii. Its management also includes Bruce Padula, former VP of sales at Novell.

The Novell Technology Center in Provo turns out to be sharing room/space/place with other companies (maybe due to Novell shrinking over time). From this week’s news we have:

VMT (Vernier Moon Torque) Technologies, a development and licensing company headquartered at the Novell Technology Center in Provo, Utah, is developing a positively engaged, metal-to-metal infinitely variable transmission. The Universal Transmission, which uses an engaged drive chain rather than a friction belt, will be able to increase fuel efficiency by up to 30% or more while generating high torque performance, according to the company.

More space sharing with Broadcom got reported this week: “They will join other market leading companies including Novell, GMAC, and Honeywell, already based at the business park.”

Another last tidbit:

The heart of the laboratory is a 225-gigabyte database of environmental and agricultural project records running on six HP servers and two Novell servers storing the data and running the software being tested.

Novell’s sale in two parts can prove rather disruptive to existing Novell customers such as this one. It sure has been a huge distraction. █

Summary: Novell news from the past two weeks (excepting SUSE/OpenSUSE)

THERE is a heap of stuff to be shared here this week, but none of it is groundbreaking.

Back in December, Ron Hovsepian was marketing his own products in Forbes, advocating Novell terminology such as “Intelligent workload management”. Here are some comments on the article. Forbes is letting Novell’s Dragoon do the same thing sometimes. This magazine is run by business, for business. Processor.com has quoted Novell’s Richard Whitehead again (it’s not unusual for them, either):

Richard Whitehead, director of product marketing for data center solutions at Novell (www.novell.com), says there are three key trends in virtualization shaping up for the coming year.

[...]

For all of virtualization’s promise of fundamental change, however, Novell’s Whitehead says IT’s priorities won’t change much despite the radically different data center landscape.

From “Marketing Manager for Novell’s developer and database product groups” comes another little placement.

Despite the layoffs and the fact that Novell is "going downhill", one company named it as a job destination, which fed Novell’s PR team.

Glassdoor.com, a career and workplace community that brings greater transparency to company cultures, compensation and the interview process, have just released the second annual Employees’ Choice Awards, listing the top 50 “Best Places to Work,” according to surveys collected from U.S.-based employees in 2009.

A former Novell employee who is writing for CNET has given lip service to Novell’s Pulse, which the rest of the press is just ignoring by now.

Novell is doing this with its Pulse service for Google Wave, a testament to just how innovative software can be when it isn’t locked behind a firewall by IT. Others should follow suit, and not create clones of the consumer Web as Tibco has with its Twitter clone, Tibbr.

SCO

Nobody except Groklaw seems to be covering SCO matters these days. Some of the latest articles (and snippets of interest) are:

1. Agenda for Wednesday’s Bankruptcy Hearing: SUSE & Petrofsky

The agenda for the hearing on Wednesday in the SCO bankruptcy is now available. It’s SUSE’s motion to lift the stay that will be argued and the Petrofsky motion to compel, and maybe some uncontested housekeeping issues. So this is one hearing not to miss, if any of you can attend. It begins at 10 AM. Same place. The usual suspects.

Relax. Just kidding.

2. Caldera GPLd Its Brains Out – Want to See?

Would you like to see some places where Caldera has copyright notices in Linux on code it contributed under the GPL, and you’re frustrated because some of us have Caldera CDs and you don’t? Just go to Google code search and search for

license:gpl “caldera.com”

You’ll be buried in GPL’d Caldera code, 5,000 hits.

3. An Offer of Arbitration Docs from Ryan Tibbitts & A Proposed Amended Schedule for Tomorrow

SCO General Counsel Ryan Tibbitts has filed a Declaration [PDF] with the bankruptcy court in support of Edward Cahn’s objection to SUSE’s motion for relief from the automatic stay. SUSE would like to finish the Swiss arbitration, as you know, and SCO would like to keep it from going forward. Tibbitts offers to submit to the judge sealed materials from the arbitration that he claims give evidence that SUSE is not likely to prevail in what he claims is the “highly contested” arbitration.

4. Minutes from the SCO Bankruptcy Hearing Posted

5. Eyewitness Reports from the SCO Bankruptcy Hearing on SUSE’s Motion to Lift Stay

As you can see, it tipped toward at least a partial lifting of the stay, although how a partial lifting helps is a mystery to me. But notice how the SCO position makes very little sense? At one point, Ms. Fatell argues that SUSE and Novell are one and the same, according to our reporter’s notes. Then SCO argues that they are not suing SUSE, but if they are one and the same, what difference would that make? SCO is suing Novell *over* SUSE’s Linux, which is what brought the arbitration into the picture. So it makes no sense. And is it possible that Ms. Fatell does not know that SCO’s litigation filings in the IBM case do ask for billions? And their intentions, SCO’s new management’s, are now fairly clear, I’d say. I’ll wait until I get to see a transcript or listen to the audio to form a definite conclusion, but it appears that newSCOmanagement is very much like oldSCOmanagement in not comprehending the GPL at all and hoping for some short-term gains no matter what happens in the last act.

Here is an excellent and long accumulation of old findings about SCO’s right to sue (or rather, lack of right to sue):

But consider what we know for sure SCO did do, distribute its code in UnitedLinux under the GPL. In the FOSS marketplace, they do that, and back then SCO was a Linux company. And what is simply true is that you can’t operate in the FOSS space unless you do share under the GPL or some other Open Source license that indeed can affect your rights, especially with respect to suing people for copyright infringement. And both Santa Cruz and Caldera, now SCO Group, understood that, and complied with the terms, grudgingly but they at least pretended that it was a great thing. For example, here’s a couple of screenshots for you from the goode olde dayes, when they each wanted to cooperate with the FOSS world.

And on it goes:

7. Hearing Set for Feb. 4 for Novell Motion to Set Aside Judgment – And a Mystery Solved – Update

There is a hearing coming up on February 4 at 3 PM before Judge Stewart in SCO v. Novell, and I surely hope some of you can attend, regarding Novell’s recently filed motion asking to set aside an earlier judgment by Judge Kimball, so Novell can go after monies SCO took in from Microsoft and companies that bought a SCOsource license.

But there’s something odd in the notice about the hearing. It says also on the schedule that day will be oral argument on docket number 277 [PDF], Novell’s Motion for Summary Judgment on SCO’s First Claim for Slander of Title Based on Failure to Establish Special Damages, which was decided in Novell’s favor long ago. Novell didn’t ask for that judgment to be opened up, that I can see, nor would it, since it won that motion, and neither has SCO filed any such motion that I can find. So how is this scheduled for this hearing? That is the mystery.

8 . SCO Opposes Novell Motion to Set Aside Judgment

SCO, “by and through the Chapter 11 Trustee in Bankruptcy, Edward N. Cahn”, has filed its opposition to Novell’s Motion to Set Aside Judgment.

9. Trial in SCO v. Novell Now Scheduled for 15 Days Beginning March 8 – Correction

So two months before it resumes.

Novell’s MoFo story is mentioned again in Legal Brief.

Finance

Bharat is still selling information about Novell while also advertising it. Movements of the shares are not particularly important, but they are mentioned in:

1. ICx, Intellicheck Rise; YRC Worldwide Falls

Novell, Inc (NOVL) climbed 2.1% or 8 cents to $4.22.

2. How has the market reacted to Novell Inc. post-earnings? NOVL, ASIA, MFE, CHKP

Novell Inc. (NOVL) released its earnings announcement on 12/03. The company reported a change in quarter-over-quarter sales of -11.89% and posted an EPS (trailing twelve months) of – .62.

3. Tech Stocks Soar in 2009

Thirteen companies had triple-digit gains and 25 had double-digit stock increases. Only one vendor, Novell, had a single digit stock price increase (9 percent). And only two vendors saw their stock prices decrease.

4. Top 5 Small-Cap Stocks In The Technology Sector With The Highest Cash (CLWR, SAY, CIEN, NOVL, SATS)

NOVL’s shares have risen by just 8.29% over the past 52 weeks, as compared to a 21.59% rise in S&P 500.

Netware

“Great and Disappointing Operating Systems of the Decade” include NetWare 6.5. Here is the relevant part of an article from IDG:

NetWare 6.5

The world was looking for the joiner of Novell’s time-honored and rock-solid NetWare network operating system to be joined fully to Linux. Novell had just purchased SuSE Linux and it looked as though the world might have a powerhouse to rival the initial foibles of Microsoft’s then-embryonic Active Directory. Would eDirectory become a rival and gain authentication market share. Today, that goal is an unfulfilled dream for most.

NetWare was also mentioned here and alluded to here:

•Novell networks. The problem with personal computers was that they were, well, personal. Everyone became an island. Local area networks came along, with Novell being the dominant player, and permitted us to be linked to one another for sharing files and devices.

Virtualisation

Except for hype from Novell’s marketing people, the company’s virtualisation products were only mentioned here as an aside.

Related to testing, virtualization technology has matured to the point that almost every organization can reap the benefits with server virtualization products such as Microsoft Corp.’s Virtual Machine Manager, Novell Inc.’s PlateSpin Virtualization and Workload Management suite and VMware Inc.’s vSphere.

Here is a new commercial disguised as “whitepaper”. It’s about ZENworks application virtualisation. Other quick mentions of Novell virtualisation can be found in:

1. Oracle Rumored to Snap up Citrix under IBM’s Nose; VMware, are you listening?

Oracle has already declared war on many fronts and by doing a Citrix acquisition it will definitely make a massive statement to the virtualization market leaving Oracle, Microsoft and VMware as the main contenders and also Red Hat and Novell slightly into the virtualization market.

2. VDI Rolling Review: Ericom’s WebConnect Goes Above And Beyond

WebConnect supports all the major virtualization platforms out there, and Ericom is the first broker we’ve tested that natively supports XenServer. The only other VDI vendor to do so is Citrix itself. Ericom also supports some community versions of Xen, like Red Hat and Novell Xen, and easily takes the prize for the largest number of supported virtualization engines WebConnect installed relatively easily in the lab, and can be deployed on a single physical server or on a virtual machine for smaller environments.

The ‘Microsoft press’ is pushing the agenda of its masters by writing about the Gartner|Burton talking points for Hyper-V [1, 2] (comparing VMware to Netware). Here is some more marketing waffle from John Dragoon, who tactlessly offers lip service to the pay-to-say Gartner Group. The Burton Group will be consumed by Gartner and what might as well explain Dragoon’s attitude are the roots in Novell:

The Burton Group was founded in 1990 by Lewis and Craig Burton, both of whom had been at Novell. Lewis bought Burton out and through acquisitions took on several other partners.

Very interesting! We’ll write some more about former Novell employees further down in the same post.

Another such analogy which resembles the Hyper-V “Slog” [PDF] comes from Tim O’Reilly, who writes:

(Henry Blodget makes this case in Hey, Apple, Wake Up — It’s Happening Again. On the other hand, Mark Sigal raises a different historical analogy, Novell vs. Microsoft, asking whether Google’s release of its own anointed phone might end up blunting adoption by other vendors, while Google takes the eye off its core business. A lot depends on whether Google holds back anything from the platform available to others. At today’s press conference, Google emphasized the open platform aspect of Android, so they are trying to address that fear. The model seems to be to work with individual partners to push the ball forward, but to return those innovations to the pool available to all partners.)

Mail

Novell actually advertises against Microsoft Exchange for a change. Both Microsoft and Novell are suffering from Google at the moment.

These workers will be using Gmail, Google Docs and other apps to work together, saving what the city’s CIO said would be millions of dollars. Google replaced the legacy Novell GroupWise system and beat out Microsoft and others for the pact. Sounds like a win-win for everyone, right?

Groupwise is also mentioned here:

ExchangeDefender is tailored to a small business’ e-mail system, and works with Microsoft (News – Alert) Exchange, Lotus Domino, Novell Groupwise or any other SMTP mail server, the company said. Like Autotask, ExchangeDefender runs off of set policies to secure end clients’ e-mail servers from viruses, malware, adware and other threats.

A new Groupwise video was uploaded to YouTube very recently:

Identity Management

An article on identity mentioned Novell for its role in this market.

This was echoed by Novell’s Justin Steinman (vice president of solution and product marketing), who said: “2010 will be the year that we take identity into the clouds. Everyone in the industry is excited about using cloud computing.” However, he also voiced some major concerns about these moves, adding: “But what about the security concerns? How do you control who has access to what data in the cloud? How do you ensure that roles are enforced? How do you provision and, more importantly, de-provision identity in the cloud?”

Security

Justin Steinman was also mentions in this post:

# Cloud providers address security concerns. “Security is the number-one inhibitor to cloud adoption,” says Novell’s Justin Steinman. Users can expect to see technologies that allow cloud providers to meet different customer security requirements.

Novell is applying some minor changes when it comes to support.

Effective from the 1st of February, Novell is changing its support terms for access to patches and service packs.

Among new vulnerability reports we find this older one which affects eDirectory:

Novell has released a security update for its eDirectory server to remedy a heap overflow vulnerability. Attackers can remotely exploit the flaw to crash or penetrate a server.

People

Google was voted “company of the decade” and its CEO’s roots in Novell are mentioned here:

Larry Page and Sergey Brin are aided and abetted by Eric Schmidt, a director of the company since 2001. He was formerly at Novell, Sun and Apple.

More here:

Schmidt’s previous gigs at Novell and Sun Microsystems showed him what could happen when innovative companies were slowly subsumed by determined competitors with deep pockets (Novell versus Microsoft) and open software married to cheap hardware (Sun versus Linux). This time, he’s marrying both in an attempt to remake mobile computing in Google’s image by taking on Apple and the wireless carriers.

Schmidt has no obligations to Novell anymore; in fact, he’s taking some of Novell’s market share (as shown above).

In South Africa, the departure of Stafford Masie from Google is called one of the top 10 ICT stories of 2009. Masie previously quit Novell South Africa.

4. Head of Google South Africa’s resignation
Stafford Masie, Chief Executive of Google South Africa, resigned from his position at the company in March 2009, citing personal reasons. Masie joined Google in 2007, after working as the South African country manager of Novell.

Jim Tanner, who has some Novell background, is becoming Senior Vice President (SVP) at inContact. Here is some coverage about it:

1. Tanner led the product and market strategy at software and telecommunications companies such as Unisys, Novell and Realm Business Solutions.

Prior to inContact, Tanner led the product and market strategy at software and telecommunications companies such as Unisys, Novell and Realm Business Solutions.

2. Jim Tanner Joins inContact as Senior Vice President of Product and Strategy

3. Jim Tanner becomes Senior Vice President of Product and Strategy of inContact

4. inContact names Jim Tanner as senior VP of product and strategy

Tanner has experience in leading product and market strategy at software and telecommunications companies like Unisys, Novell and Realm Business Solutions prior to joining inContact.

Nancy Reynolds, who used to work for Novell, is becoming the channel chief of Kaspersky. This was covered in:

1. First take on Nancy Reynolds as Kaspersky channel chief

2. Kaspersky hires ex-Novell/Dell executive as its channel chief

3. Kaspersky Snags Dell Channel Star To Lead Sales Charge

4. Reynolds To Propel Kaspersky’s Enterprise Push

5. Channel Advocate Joins Kaspersky Lab Americas To Lead Corporate Sales Division

6. Nancy Reynolds Leaves Dell to Join Kaspersky Lab

“Nancy is one of the top channel executives in the industry. Her experience, work ethic and passion for winning make her an asset to any organization,” Gary Abad, vice president of channel sales at F5 Networks, wrote on Reynolds’ LinkedIn profile. Abad worked with Reynolds at Novell as vice present of channel sales.

7. Kaspersky Lab Planning Managed Security Services Strategy

Kaspersky Lab, the fast-growing anti-virus software provider, is planning a managed services partner strategy that will likely surface within 30 to 60 days, according to Senior VP of Corporate Sales Nancy Reynolds. Kaspersky’s move is part of a larger trend: Multiple anti-virus companies — McAfee, Panda Security, Sophos, Symantec and Trend Micro — are polishing their managed services strategies. Here’s a sampling of where we’re heading.

Here is the press release.

Stephanie Tilton, from whom came some Novell marketing material, is mentioned here.

Harnessing her unique blend of technical knowledge, marketing savvy, and writing skills, Stephanie has crafted nearly 100 case studies and white papers for leading brands such as Akamai Technologies, EMC, Macromedia, Novell, SAP, and Symantec. Her website is Ten Ton Marketing.

Partners

There is nothing major here this week, but Novell was just mentioned in a couple of press releases from Unitrends [1, 2], which can also be seen in this site and that site:

JSO Technology, a Wauawatosa based consulting firm is pleased to announce their partnership with Unitrends. Unitrends is a leading provider of innovative, integrated solutions that protect and restore critical data and systems.

[...]

Whether it is for a new Windows Server 2008 with Exchange Server 2010 or VMware vSphere 4 server, backup for a legacy Novell Netware or Windows NT 3.5 server, backup for a developer’s Linux workstation or a sales rep’s Windows 7 notebook, backup for a SAN, NAS, or simply a directly-attached disk drive or a simple PC, Unitrends can address most of our customer’s back up requirements.”

Novell certifications were mentioned here and an old partner, Wyse, includes Novell in its latest two press releases [1, 2]. Novell also got mentioned by Computhink. █

Summary: Dull week passes by, but we pick up and present some of the minor developments surrounding Novell

IT is a holiday, so this one will be short.

Finance

Novell was mentioned occasionally in light of Red Hat's good results.

Rival Novell, Inc. (NOVL | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating), which is the world’s second largest seller of Linux software, earlier this month reported a wider fourth quarter net loss, hurt by goodwill impairment and restructuring charges. However, the company’s quarterly earnings per share, excluding items, beat analysts’ estimate as did its quarterly revenues. The company also forecast first quarter revenue above analysts’ estimate.

More on Novell’s “reogs”, which are a lot more than just that:

Novell announced that in response to changing market conditions it was reorganising its existing four divisions, or units, down to two.

There is a new and very detailed report about Novell, titled “turning the Linux market into a healthy duopoly”

Key Chapters of the report:

Linux: revenue and strategy driver

An increasing slice of Novell’s revenues

Linux in two different guises: SLES/D and OES

17% of profitable revenues from SLE

19% of profitable revenues from OES

Positive sales feedback loop driver

Via customers and (in)direct channels

Via SLE as well as OES

Increased reliance on Microsoft

Microsoft has proven critical to Novell’s Linux growth

Novell’s reliance on Microsoft is increasing and distorting

Opening up the OpenSUSE project

This report is selling for $1,350.

Netware

Novell’s networking products received a little mention in this article which was titled “The year of AJAX and REST services?”

That iffy emerging technology was Microsoft Windows, and the versions that made me really jump in after years of skeptical puttering were Windows 3 and Windows NT. Lest you think that was an easy call, at the time the industry press was all over Novell networking and IBM OS/2 as the serious up-and-coming technologies for business. I did hedge my bets; I kept OS/2 available as a boot option on my DOS/Windows machine, and I worked with a client whose product used Novell networks at hotels, but my main focus was Windows.

A small portion on CNEs, whose skills lose a lot in terms of value:

As the support costs for this model grew, companies began to realize that perhaps the distributed model was not the panacea it was purported to be, and networked computing came back in vogue (Remember when everyone wanted to become a Microsoft MSCE or Novell Certified Network Engineer?)

An old and familiar comparison appears again:

Microsoft was late to the market, but that didn’t stop the company from taking over other technology areas in the past. And that history led to some comparisons between VMware and Novell, the former software king that Microsoft dethroned in the 1990s.

Virtualisation

Matt Richards from Novell has published this post where he is promoting his company a little.

In fact, Novell research has found up to 50 percent of support issues result from problems introduced during product installation.

Another example:

5 Things Every CEO Should Know About Cloud Computing

[...]

Ron Hovsepian, President and CEO of Novell, highlights five important elements in an article on Forbes.com….

Novell as a Xen backer:

Although x64 hypervisors are heading for commoditisation, they are not there yet. Even when they reach that stage, there is no guarantee that customers will be able to switch from one to the other easily. That raises an important question about the future of the open source Xen hypervisor and the virtualisation platforms built on it by Xen’s three main backers, Citrix, Oracle and Novell.

Identity Management, Mail, and Insecurity

A journalist from Latvia has uploaded this new video covering Novell’s business activities around identity management.

There were also tiny portions about Groupwise support and SUSE flaws.

People and Partners

Novell and F5 Networks are seen as potentially connected by the appointment of Gary Abad.

Abad was most recently VP Channel Sales for Polycom, and has also served at Novell and Symbol Technologies.

More here:

Gary Abad will take the reins at the application delivery networking company, following his most recent position as vice president of Americas channel sales at Polycom.

[...]

Abad held sales management and business development at Novell and Symbol Technologies, which is now a part of Motorola.

Novell was mentioned in some press releases that shed light on existing partnerships.

With this authorization, Koenig adds another feather to its already impressive list of authorizations which includes: Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, Red Hat, Novell, LPI, CIW, CWNP, EC-Council and SCP.

Marketing

Promotions for BrainShare 2010 are made more visible as Novell tries to make it a reality. Novell has just made another video in addition to 2 previous ones [1, 2]. “20TEN” is the motto.

Speaking of videos, it looks like an older one about SUSE has been pushed into YouTube again and Novell is also mentioned in the latest Linux News Log.

That’s about it for this week. █

Summary: The latest catchup with Novell news that might not affect GNU/Linux in any direct way

NOTHING particularly special can be seen here this week, but the SCO case is worth starting with because of some key issues.

SCO

The AutoZone case seems to be over, as decided several weeks ago. SCO still reads Groklaw (maybe it heckles the Web site a lot less after this strategy backfired) and Pamela Jones has proof.

Words to live by. So, lawyers do read Groklaw. We knew that, including SCO’s, but so did SCO’s management. SCO executives have smeared Groklaw and me from here to Kingdom Come for half a decade, so we knew they had to read it. But it is the first time I’ve seen a bill for reading Groklaw.

Well, quite a few Novell employees regularly read Boycott Novell. They mostly lurk.

Here is the latest update on SCO’s bankruptcy.

We find out now what Ocean Park Advisors has been doing on SCO’s behalf since they were hired by the Chapter 11 Trustee Edward Cahn. Submitting a bill for $196,002.50. Gulp. For six weeks’ work. When you see the breakdown of their bill, in the attached Exhibit A, you’ll see that they have been going over the company with a fine tooth comb.

Their job is to try to save the company, and let’s face it, that’s a job for Superman. But you know what? If paying professionals could save SCO, it would have happened already. SCO is Kryptonite, y’all. And indeed, by my reading of the bill, there is no salvation in sight just yet, despite all their hard work. I guess the advisors and hand holders will just have to keep their noses to the grindstone, trying to crack this nut, until every last penny SCO has is gone. After all, we don’t want to give up on SCO too soon.

Finance

Novell’s bad results are an issue that we wrote about before [1, 2], noting that the company lost over $200,000,000 in 2009. Novell’s Jeff Jaffe rewrites the strategy, but it remains unconvincing that a turnaround is afoot. Here is a new analysis of Novell and also additional coverage of the financial situation:

• Novell’s losses widen despite Linux gains

Novell Inc. said its network-software business contracted in fiscal 2009, while its open source-based product line continued to garner a larger portion of the company’s revenue.

For the fiscal year ended Oct. 31, Waltham, Mass.-based Novell booked net revenue of $862 million, versus net revenue of $957 million in fiscal 2008.

• Linux is only bright spot as Novell reports loss

Sales of Linux products provided the only area of growth for Novell in its fiscal year ending 31 October 2009, as the vendor reported a decline in revenues.

• US Stock Futures Jumps On Upbeat Jobs Report, Take-Two (NASDAQ: TTWO) Eyed

• Novell posts wider 4Q loss on charges

• Novell 4Q Loss Widens On $279 Million Charge, Lower Revenue

• Wall Street Breakfast: Must-Know News

• 3 Stocks That Blew the Market Away

Just as Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) has found a lucrative niche in monetizing the Linux platform, Novell needs to get over NetWare and throw a little more muscle behind its open-source initiatives.

• Novell’s losses widen despite Linux gains

• Novell and Marvel Announce Earnings

• Novell Stumbles, Eyes New Strategy

• Novell posts Q4 net loss of US$256mn – Regional

• Novell posts wider 4Q loss on charges

• Novell, Inc. – Financial And Strategic Analysis Review – New Report Published

• Novell’s Earnings Beat (more from Zacks also here: Novell Q4: Earnings Beat, But Revenue Lower)

• Table of Unusual NASDAQ Stock Moves From Townsend Analytics

• Novell fourth-quarter loss widens to $255.7 mln

• Big Lots, Monster Rise; Take-Two Plunges

• Novell widens loss in weak Q4 and year

• Stocks Futures Point To Substantial Rally Following Much Improved Employment Data – U.S. Commentary

Software solutions provider Novell Inc. (NOVL) reported a wider net loss for the fourth quarter, hurt by goodwill impairment, and restructuring expenses. Looking ahead, the company provided revenue outlook for the first quarter, which is estimated to beat the Street expectations.

• Novell Reports 4Q Results

That’s all we have managed to find, but there is likely to be a lot more.

Virtualisation

In a speculative piece, Hess opines that Novell might buy Parallels next year.

The other noteworthy announcement made at VMworld was the purchase of Parallels by Novell. This move wasn’t as much of a surprise as one might think. It actually fits in well with Novell’s SUSE Linux offering, their Platespin product and controversial partnership with Microsoft. It’s a wise move by Novell and plants them firmly as a major force in the virtualization space.

The PlateSpin acquisition was mentioned in this article several days ago:

The Holy Grail is for someone to come along with a management tool that can handle such mixed environments. There are people working on such tools, including PlateSpin before Novell acquired it.

Mail

Groupwise support in the BlackBerry Curve gets mentioned again along with a this new GWAVA release and GWAVACon sponsorship. There was nothing else of interest.

Identity Management

The previous post covered some of this, but there is more about identity management in the following pair of news articles:

• The New Cloud Crowd – Three Trends for 2010

Next, I saw a Computer World article about Novell and their product for Identify Management in the cloud http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9141830/Novell_vows_first_identity_management_for_cloud_virtualized_apps?taxonomyId=145 . You remember Novell, the makers of NetWare, Groupwise and more recently the purveyors of SCO. This typifies the second major trend for the cloud for 2010 – Any technology product that can be cloud-enabled will be cloud-enabled.

• Tech Bits: TriZetto, Novell

In other insurance technology news, Western & Southern Financial Group, Cincinnati, has agreed to use the Novell Access Governance Suite and Novell Identity Manager systems from Novell Inc., Waltham, Mass., to automate and improve compliance processes.

Security

Apart from some iPrint vulnerabilities [1, 2, 3] there was this:

Supporting flexible software over too secured software, Eugene points out, “remember IBM OS or Novell? We they disappeared.”

Seems like a loss for words.

People

A new CodecSys manager is being appointed with a little bit of Novell baggage:

Broadcast International (OTCBB: BCST) (“BI”), www.brin.com, today announced the addition of Steven G. Jones as senior vice president and general manager of the CodecSys division. He is responsible for all development, sales and marketing, and strategic direction for the division.

[...]

He has also held the position of CEO at Auction Trust Network and Solera Networks, vice president of products & business development at Vykor, and executive roles in product management/sales/business development at other companies including Mosaix, Netegrity, DataChannel and Novell.

Another case of Novell roots:

He has also held executive positions at Legato, Novell and WordPerfect Corporation.

Google’s Eric Schmidt was captured in the spotlight a few times because of something he had said. The Microsoft crowd (Paul Thurrott for example) takes advantage of a tactless remark and pays tribute to Schmidt’s Novell roots.

Google CEO: Privacy Doesn’t Exist in Online Age
And he should know, since he’s ostensibly running the company that’s responsible for this state of affairs. Google CEO Eric Schmidt, previously responsible for such runaway success stories as Java and Novell, found himself in a bit of hot water this week when he opined on CNBC that “if you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

More on Schmidt at Novell:

• Google CEO backs Obama recovery plan

The Google CEO grew up in Northern Virginia and joined the Mountain View, Calif., company in 2001 after a stint as CEO of Novell and chief technology officer of Sun Microsystems Inc. Mr. Schmidt indicated that business inventories and corporate profits were looking better, including at his own employer.

• EtherJet does the Google Wave

Wave seems to be of keen interest to CEO Eric Schmidt, who has called it “the future of collaboration.” Schmidt has been pushing the idea since the 1990s, when he was best known as the “father of Java” over at Sun Microsystems, before he was recruited to be CEO of Novell and long before Google made him a billionaire.

• When Google Runs Your Life

In 1997 Schmidt left to head Novell ( NOVL – news – people ). A powerhouse in corporate networking, the Orem, Utah company had also been sideswiped by a Microsoft offering that came with a lot more features and ties to other products. Novell countered by trying to add its own Apps business, but its $1.5 billion acquisition of WordPerfect Corp. proved a botched affair. Three days after Schmidt started the job he was told that an expected $20 million profit on the quarter was really a $20 million loss. He fired 1,000-plus people and logged 250,000 miles a year selling Novell’s software, overseeing a return to its core directory business. Novell’s stock rose sevenfold, only to collapse amid the dot-com bust and continued onslaughts by Microsoft.

Partners

Novell is making partners in India and launches Partner Academy.

Novell announced the launch of the India Partner Academy, a training programme designed to empower Novell’s partners in India, Sri Lanka and Pakistan in selling, distributing and supporting all of Novell’s solutions in the areas of Data Centre; Identity and Security and End-user Computing.

From CIOL (India):

Novell is our national distributor for the embedded OAS and it plays a big role in rapid development of our products,” said Sutane.

In South Africa, a company called Xepa gets closer to Novell.

Cape Town’s Xepa Consulting is putting its Novell specialty to good use as it has been brought in to assist in a major systems upgrade for the Datacentrix client KWV.

Also of limited interest:

The software supports HP servers and storage running Microsoft Windows®, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell, and Novell Open Enterprise Server for Netware and Linux.

Novell was mentioned very briefly in some press releases and other pages. Novell typically gets covered when lists of companies are given.

Marketing

The Waltham-headquartered company is using so-called “success stories” to increase interest in its proprietary software products. Novell is also mentioned in the latest Linux News Log.

Novell has released yet another BrainShare 2010 advert (we mentioned the previous one last week) and in response to the claim that it is the “Worst IT commercial ever!” Novell answers: “It’s NOT a commercial. It is just a little video series that we created to go along with the Year 2010. This was nothing more than a play on the number 20 and the number 10. In the case of these videos 20 weird things these two guys do in 10 seconds.”

Utah

The Novell campus in Provo was hosting another local event, which received the usual type of coverage.

The Utah Valley Entrepreneurial Forum’s annual UVEF Awards event is Thursday from noon to 1:30 p.m. at the Provo Novell Campus, Building A.

The Utah Valley Entrepreneurial Forum (UVEF) today announced winners of the 2009 Annual UVEF Awards. The awards recognize Utah companies and leaders for innovation, business growth and contributions to the entrepreneurial community. Award recipients were honored at ceremonies held today at the Provo Novell Campus.

Next week ought to be a quieter one. █

Summary: Novell’s legal, proprietary, and increasingly SaaS-based business as defined by the past week’s news

IT may seem repetitive, but this week too saw no major announcements from Novell.

Novell’s latest major announcement was probably the one about Pulse, which hardly gets mentioned by this stage. Here is one exception from several days ago:

Novell (NOVL) has an upcoming product called Novel Pulse that makes real-time collaboration more suitable for corporate users by providing companies the tools to limit groups and visibility and structure the type of collaboration that is possible. SAP (SAP) also has an application for Google Wave called Gravity in the works.

The term “PMS” is used to describe a variety of affairs, including this one with Novell.

Over the years, I have been staggered by the emotions and attachment some IT Professionals show to a particular brand. I was even got caught up in it: I bleed Novell red for a decade. I felt like I lost a child when I heard my largest Novell network had switched to Windows. About a year ago, I began to research this topic and I think I have found a bit of understanding of PMS and a possible source….

Here is an unusual mentioning of Novell:

IBM was based on Quaker values, Novell was based on Mormon values and Lotus, we think, was based on atheist values. But neither Microsoft nor Google are based on any religious values at all.

There is also this:

Even one of the industry pioneers, Novell, has moved quickly with a full fledged product line to support solution providers bringing cloud solutions to the market. In fact, Dan Dufault, global director of partner marketing, for Novell, called Novell an “arms dealer” for the cloud computing revolyution that is reshaping the market.

Speaking of those “cloud solutions” (loosely defined), here is another new article of relevance:

“Developing your own cloud-based system gives you choice, power and flexibility. Many companies, including IBM, Novell, Unisys and others, have already begun reaping the financial, business and security benefits of tailoring their own private cloud environments”, he explained.

WordPerfect

Novell is still fighting in court over WordPerfect, which has just changed hands again (with the Corel takeover).

Founded in 1985 with CorelDraw as its linchpin, Corel has struggled to compete with Microsoft Word and Microsoft Office after acquiring the WordPerfect software title from Novell Inc. back in 1996. Corel has also produced literally dozens of other software titles over the years, often after acquiring them from other software vendors.

More coverage (which mentions Novell) includes:

i. Corel Saves Itself, WordPerfect, and CorelDraw from Brink

Founded in 1985 with CorelDraw as its linchpin, Corel has struggled to compete with Microsoft Word and Microsoft Office after acquiring the WordPerfect software title from Novell back in 1996. Corel has also produced literally dozens of other software titles over the years, often after acquiring them from other software vendors.

ii. Corel Buys Out Corel

This morning, long-time software maker Corel Corporation turned over full ownership to Corel Holdings, a limited partnership controlled by an affiliate of Vector Capital, majority investor of the company behind many familiar software programs like WordPerfect, CorelDRAW, WinZip, Paint Shop Pro and WinDVD (most of them obtained through acquisition of smaller software firms).

SCO

From the WordPerfect case we may as well move on to the SCO case. A very long post was published about SCO’s bankruptcy, followed by some more information and an article from Tom Harvey that says:

SCO Group lawsuit against Novell back on track

[...]

The SCO Group is opposing Novell’s suggestion, and the dispute signals that the case in back on track. In addition, SCO’s response reflects the trustee’s decision to “aggressively” pursue the lawsuits — even after the ouster of SCO boss Darl McBride, who started the legal battles.

[...]

But Edward Cahn, a former federal judge appointed by the judge to oversee the company while it tries to restructure itself and emerge from bankruptcy, opposes the consolidation. Keeping the cases separate would be a simpler and quicker route to trial, he said in a declaration.

The Pelican lawsuit Darl McBride is involved in (read [1, 2, 3, 4] for some background) gets this update from Groklaw.

The Pelican cases inches forward, with Robert V. Brazell, Stephen Norris, Talos Partners, and Rama Ramachandran filing their Answer with Counterclaim [PDF] to Pelican’s First Amended Complaint. The counterclaim alleges fraud. Pelican has quickly filed a motion to dismiss the counterclaim [PDF]. And Darl McBride has filed a Reply Memorandum of Law [PDF] in support of his motion to dismiss for lack of jurisdiction.

Finance

Almost nothing about trade, except this.

The J. M. Smucker Company led gainers in the S&P 500 index with a rise of 4.6% followed by gains in E*TRADE Financial Corporation 3.6%, in Novell, Inc of 2.2% and in J. C. Penney Company, Inc of 2.2%.

Mail

Novell’s Groupwise is mentioned in the following article and also in this new video about Blackberry Curve (which supports Groupwise).

Surely you remember groupware, an industry term that referred to suites of networked collaboration tools meant to unite teams and enhance productivity. Novell (Nasdaq: NOVL) has been selling GroupWise for more than 20 years. IBM (NYSE: IBM) still calls Lotus Notes collaboration software. And Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) has SharePoint, arguably the most popular buy-and-install collaboration platform available today.

Mail servers are in review over at GCN, including Groupwise 8 (direct link). Novell Evolution is mentioned here:

Zmail is compatible with desktop e-mail applications such as Outlook, Thunderbird, Apple Desktop and Novell Evolution and has increased storage capabilities for high-res audio and video files. Attachments can be viewed immediately as HTML. Other features available in Zmail are RSS, a powerful search capability, tagging, and conversation views that help prevent inbox clutter.

Identity Management

Novell’s own story about the Western & Southern Financial Group was mentioned many times before, but here it is continuing to reappear.

The press is still parroting many other reports, such as “Novell, Logica partner”. There is little (or none at all) new information there. Sometimes it seems like the press does doing nothing but parrot press releases (no investigation, no fact checking), like in this case.

In other insurance technology news, Western & Southern Financial Group, Cincinnati, has agreed to use the Novell Access Governance Suite and Novell Identity Manager systems from Novell Inc., Waltham, Mass., to automate and improve compliance processes.

That’s just repetition of the press release.

Novell’s Access Manager is now receiving support from Nordic Edge, which is actually news.

Nordic Edge has always supported Novell’s Access Manager making it easy for customers who need secure remote access to integrate Nordic Edge solutions with their Access Manager product. Now Nordic Edge provides that support for Access Manager 3.1, ensuring integration is as easy and flexible as before.

People

The press in the west coast shares this story of someone who used to work with Novell.

Two years ago I was a Silicon Valley veteran of nearly twenty years. I’d had a typical whirlwind career, gathering expertise about technology partnerships with Europe and creating software with smart teammates at companies like Novell, Remedy and Borland.

Forbes writes about Eric Schmidt and mentions his past role at Novell.

Schmidt had been a successful chief technology officer at Sun in its glory days. But he had performed poorly in his one stint as a turnaround CEO at Novell. Still, venture capitalist and Google board member John Doerr had a hunch that Schmidt’s patient engineering management style was exactly what was needed at Google.

The newly-appointed CEO of TheInfoPro turns out to have history as a Novell executive.

TheInfoPro offers highly customizable data in the sectors of networking, storage, servers and information security. Prior to joining TheInfoPro, Ruzic was the CEO of Exclaim, a leader in user-generated content, socialization and infotainment community applications for mobile consumers. Ruzic has also held key executive positions at several marquee IT companies, including Borland International, BEA Systems and Novell.

Partners

There are new additions to TMCNet’s PR garbage can and Novell is mentioned there too, mostly in other companies’ press releases. To give an example from Koenig:

With this authorization, Koenig adds another feather to its already impressive list of authorizations which includes: Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, Red Hat, Novell, LPI, CIW, CWNP, EC-Council and SCP.

This new article about “top 100 IT projects of 2009″ only mentions Novell as follows:

Avenda for network access control, and Enterasys switches to support a blended Apple, Novell, Linux, Windows, and OS2 server environment.

From the same site we have:

More Matrix templates are planned to be available in early 2010 to cover applications from Citrix, F5, McAfee, MicroStrategy, Novell, Red Hat, SAS, Siemens PLM Software, Inc., SunGard, TIBCO Software Inc. and VMware.

Novell is still mentioned in press releases of other companies but rarely owing to an accomplishment of its own. Unless Novell can generate something new it will continue to diminish. █

Summary: A mixture of Novell news from the past week

MORE articles than usual have mentioned Novell in the past week, so here is a quick rundown.

SCO

Interesting things happen in the SCO case, whose judge buys some more time.

So, in the end, SCO got a delay, but there was no decision by the appeals court in time for them. So the real victors were IBM, Novell and the US Trustee’s Office, because what they asked for, they eventually got in essence: a neutral to take over for SCO management.

More from Groklaw:

Things are not so free and easy in SCOland, I gather, now that the Chapter 11 Trustee is running the company. Berger Singerman has filed a motion on its own behalf asking the court to please amend a prior order, the October 5, 2007 Administrative Order Establishing Procedures for Interim Monthly Compensation of Professionals, so the firm can pay itself from the retainer it has in hand. It’s been doing that for a while, but it seems the Chapter 11 Trustee notices that there is no explicit allowance to use the retainer in that order. If you remember, he already signaled that he’s looking into all the professional fees. So Berger Singerman would like an explicit order from the court saying it’s all right to do that.

A legal Web site has released a newsletter which covers the SCO-Novell UNIX case.

A ruling by the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals vacating a lower court grant of summary judgment on the issue of copyright infringement in the SCO v. Novell litigation involving rights to the UNIX operating system…

Finance

In financial news, StockPreacher.com has another new report about Novell. There have been many of these recently, for whatever reason.

StockPreacher.com announces an investment report featuring technology company Novell Inc. (Nasdaq: NOVL). The report includes financial and investment analysis, analyst consensus, and pertinent industry information you need to know to make an educated investment decision.

Networking

A Web site about printers/cartridges has this new page mentioning support for Novell Netware and lessons from Netware days are also recalled in Roughly Drafted and this long report.

Microsoft (MSFT) is another company Pabrai describes as a non-innovator that is excellent at scaling up the successful innovations of others. Microsoft’s own inventions have often failed, but when it has taken a competitor’s existing idea and applied Microsoft’s know-how is when it has been at its most successful. It took the idea of the computer mouse and graphical user interface from Apple (AAPL), Excel from Lotus, Word from Word Perfect, networking from Novell (NOVL), Internet Explorer from Netscape, XBOX from Playstation and the list goes on. In these cases, Microsoft waited for a product/service to demonstrate a certain acceptance by customers, and then went after this now proven market.

The Indian press has published this chat with a Novell SVP:

Kent Erickson, senior vice-president and general manager – workgroup of Novell spoke to DNA’s Praveena Sharma on how Novell is sitting on the cusp of a business transition.

About Active Directory, there is the following portion from IDG:

Novell was also mentioned more than once as Active Directory was compared with eDirectory (called Novell Directory Services at that time). Many feel that Novell was actually acquired by Cambridge Technology Partners (see “Pondering Novell’s future”) in 2001.

When it comes to Vista 7, Microsoft is admitting that compatibility issues persist and Novell is part of their problem.

The top three non-fixable compatibility problems include system level driver issues and references to legacy network configurations (for example, Novell network drivers).

Virtualisation

We have already explained how Microsoft impacted Xen, after Ignition Partners got involved and Citrix approached the Cambridge-based company near Redmond (with a former Microsoft employee inside). Ubuntu, Red Hat and the Linux Foundation moved over to KVM, which was bought by Red Hat. They wanted distance or independence from Microsoft’s ecosystem (XenSource/Citrix), according to at least one source. It leaves Novell in a decent relationship with Xen because Novell is close to Microsoft.

Novell’s virtualisation endeavour was mentioned in quite a few places this week, including:

i. The life and death of a virtual machine

Instead of expanding, however, the organisation shrank its data centre by consolidating 100 physical servers to 45 Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Servers, then virtualising 25 data centre servers into five physical machines.

ii. Getting a grip on multivendor virtualization

Indeed, the overall server hypervisor market is becoming rich with options, including Microsoft Hyper-V, Parallels Server for Macs, VMware ESX and Xen variants from companies such as Citrix, Oracle, Novell, Red Hat and Sun (although this last one may disappear, as essentially did the Virtual Iron hypervisor, once the Oracle acquisition closes).

iii. Hospital insources data center with PlateSpin P2V migration

A Midwestern hospital extricated itself from an unfavorable data center outsourcing deal using Novell PlateSpin physical-to-virtual migration software and VMware virtualization.

iv. VMware: five biggest challenges of server virtualisation

One way of getting around the problem is to use workload analysis and planning tools such as Novell’s Platespin. These tools evaluate what level of capacity is likely to be required for a virtualised environment based on the profile of current physical servers in terms of memory, disc, processor and network bandwidth usage.

v. Novell releases new version of its data centre profiling tool

Novell (Nasdaq:NOVL) today announced the release of its PlateSpin Recon 3.7, the latest version of its data centre workload profiling, analysis and planning tool.

vi. Mindware to showcase state-of-the-art solutions from leading IT brands at ‘GITEX 2009’

Mail

GroupWise support was seen in just a few places including this GroupWise press release about Palm Pre support from CompanionLink. There was more coverage of this and some about Notify:

NotifyLink also supports a variety of mobile devices in addition to the Palm Pre as well as a number of email platforms including Novell’s(R) GroupWise(R)…

More on GroupWise can be found here:

As Novell is moving more and more to Linux, I felt lucky today and once more was in the desperate hope that one more task which I have to do so far using an RDP session on a Windows machine can finally be handled natively on my openSUSE 11.2 installation: Administering the corporate eDirectory and GroupWise system.

The city of Los Angeles is abandoning GroupWise for sure and IDG has spread the message widely (also here, here, and here).

The City of Los Angeles isn’t giving up on a proposed plan that would replace its Microsoft Office applications and Novell GroupWise e-mail system with the hosted Google Apps services, according to a report released last week by Miguel Santana, the city’s administrative officer. He said that city officials are plowing ahead with an analysis of every aspect of a project that could turn Los Angeles into Google’s marquee cloud users or a scarecrow.

The opposition to this move has not stopped.

Simpson’s letter represents the latest effort to get the city of L.A to change its mind about a $7.25 million plan to replace its Novell GroupWise e-mail and Microsoft Office applications with Google Apps.

Identity Management

For Novell Identity Manager, there is still this successful deployment around London.

South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust (SLaM) has automated the management of 8,000 user accounts for its IT network by using Novell Identity Manager.

The main development was actually around SAP, whose special relationship with Novell can easily be understood given renewed speculations that Microsoft would buy SAP. Here is the press release (also here) and a lot of coverage that came as a result:

i. SAP and Novell team up to integrate GRC software with IT infrastructure

SAP and Novell are extending their partnership and integrating products to help organizations deal with the complexity of managing governance, risk and compliance (GRC) technology, company spokespeople said here at SAP TechEd 2009 Tuesday.

ii. Novell, SAP Partner for Governance, Compliance

SAP and Novell this week said they plan to extend their development partnership to deliver the next generation of integrated governance, risk and compliance software applications.

iii. SAP To Detail HP, Novell Development Plans At TechEd Conference (also here)

SAP will unveil expanded technology partnerships with Hewlett-Packard and Novell at its TechEd conference in Phoenix for partner and customer developers next week.

SAP and Novell, who already have a partnership built around Novell’s SUSE Linux, will announce plans to develop governance, risk and compliance systems based on Novell’s identity and security management software, said Zia Yusuf, executive vice president of SAP’s global ecosystem and partner group.

iv. SAP and Novell Join Forces on Governance, Risk and Compliance Solutions

v. SAP and Novell Expand Global Partnership

From Network World (also in other IDG sites):

Novell and SAP Tuesday announced a partnership to integrate, certify and support their respective security and identity technology and governance, risk and compliance software.

Security

Novell support can be found in the new EVault and Sentinel is mentioned in the context of this Webinar.

Most recently, Dave served as the vice president of product management at e-Security, where he was instrumental in orchestrating the overhaul of the flagship Sentinel(TM) product, helping drive more than 50 percent annual growth leading to the company’s $72M acquisition by Novell.

Nothing too special here.

People

There is a lot of stuff about Novell certifications, including this bit from the news:

In 1996 he earned certification as a Novell Administrator. He is presently enrolled in doctoral classes in distance education at the University of Texas at Tyler.

Eric Schmidt’s Novell roots were mentioned in the New York Times and a man who worked for Schmidt at Novell has this to say:

The company I hitched my horse to back then was Novell. It was run by a gentleman named Eric Schmidt. Yep, same guy who is now the CEO of Google. He took Novell to places it hadn’t seen before his arrival and we are seeing much the same with Google. When he got there it was google.com and not much else.

More on people with roots at Novell:

1. The joy, and pain, of documentation

But then I met my match with Novell Netware 3.11’s documentation. It comprised dozens of manuals that took up an entire shelf. Alas, apart from one lonely spiral bound reference booklet, it seemed to be free of any useful content. It proved to be an early example of what documentation would become — an exercise of quantity over quality.

2. EPIC Ventures and Zions Bank Venture Funds Name Christopher Stone Managing Director

Stone is best known for creating the organization and specification for the industry software standard called CORBA; he was an advocate and leader in the open source software movement, as well as Executive Vice President and Vice Chairman/Office of the CEO of Novell.

The session that Sys-Con advertises will be manned by the following individual:

Dipto Chakravarty is the Vice President of Worldwide Engineering for Novell’s Identity and Security business unit.

More new sightings:

He installed the first Novell network in Tokyo, and in 1995 sold the business to computer services giant EDS.

Partners

On the collaboration and partnership side, we have found the following about Novell:

i. Express Data adds business development staff

Express Data is also planning to add another two staff across Cisco and Novell before Christmas, Logan-Bell said, and was keen to look for another 2-4 people after January for the distributor’s more recent vendor signings.

ii. Open Channel Solutions to distribute Vasco

IT distributor, Open Channel Solutions (OCS), has signed an agreement with security vendor, Vasco Data Security International.

[...]

“The other thing that attracted us was they were a really nice fit with Novell solutions. Our company typically looks at technology that fits around the Novell ecosystem.”

iii. Disk Controller Failure is Evident and Cause Data Loss

The company provide Undelete software for Windows, Mac OS X, UNIX, Linux and Novell operating systems.

iv. Xepa introduces Cyberoam for SME threat management

He notes that the Cyberoam devices tie in with Novell Directory Services or Microsoft Active Directory to provide the capability to limit user activity on the Internet with full reporting. “A built in bandwidth manager provides for bandwidth allocation and the setting of policies to limit Internet use. In the target market for the solutions, this is a valuable feature, as for these types of organisations, bandwidth is an expensive commodity.”

Novell was also mentioned in press releases of other companies that
work with it. Training for Novell is evidently not dead yet, not as long as Novell has “legacy” products and more marketing material. █

Summary: Large assortment of Novell news from the past week

IT HAS not been a packed week for Novell, not judging by the news anyway. This week we combine some elements of SUSE with the rest of the bunch. Novell’s business is also mentioned in this new report.

SUSE Studio

SLE* is virtually out of sight and this has been the case for several months. It is mostly being sold as a ‘solution’ and part of other ‘solutions’ (software/hardware products), but although it’s on the verge of being just OpenSUSE, here are some bits of news about SUSU Studio, all found in the past week alone. Novell’s PR people wrote about it in their blog.

Back in August this year we launched SUSE Studio, a new product designed to make it very easy to build, test and deploy full-functional software appliances using Linux. SUSE Studio earned strong support from the ISV community and in the days following the launch new users were signing on at the astonishing rate of more than one a minute.

Here is a selection of new reviews, which were mostly very positive:

i. SUSE Studio – Make your own Linux

I’m very pleased with the Studio. It’s Kiwi, simplified, polished and made available to the masses. A truly great step in the right direction.

ii. SuSE Studio TestDrive: Slightly Customizing an Linux OpenSuSE 11.1

One of strengths of GNU/Linux is the proportional degree of freedom that enables the user to modify or recreate key components of the operating system. On Sept. 24, 2009 I attended the Intel Developer Forum (IDF), at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California. During the morning lunch, informally chatting with an Intel employee who claimed to be involved in his organization’s efforts in compiler development, I refuted his assertion that the multiplicity of GNU/Linux distributions was detrimental to the operating system commercial support.

iii. Suse Studio Review

Suse Studio is an excellent tool for anyone who wants to build their own Linux distribution. The online environment is comprehensive and doesn’t require any effort on your part to use. You can be using your own distribution in minutes with Testdrive, and can have tested, built and downloaded your distribution in a fraction of the time it would take you to setup the necessary environment yourself.

From Australia comes this IDG report which includes elements of SUSE.

Student Jesty Karl Salvatierra beat out his competitors in a close field, with contestants having seven hours to complete their infrastructure and IT systems configurations. Designed to test the competitors’ skills and abilities in the key areas of PC support and network maintenance in a ‘real world’ business environment, the participants had to install a guest operating system of SUSE Linux 10.2 onto a host running VMware Server.

Xandros

This is not about Novell, but the following press release is about a product which has impact on Novell at the server side. It also involves a company that signed a Microsoft patent deal similar to Novell’s.

Netherlands-based Systems Integrator employs BridgeWays Management Packs to Extend Microsoft System Center Administration to Business Critical Applications on Windows, Linux, and Unix

Recollections and Old Software

Novell happens to be mentioned in this opinion piece from Scott Fulton, who opines that size is the issue with particular companies, not just behaviour. This is not true and a long explanation can be written to counter this point of view.

Looking at this report from IDG, it appears as though Novell disappoints some customers who rely on it for DNS.

Boise State isn’t the only organization to discover that it could save money by switching from DNS software to DNS appliances. The Nevada Department of Corrections recently bought DNS appliances from BlueCat rival Infoblox to replace DNS software from Novell that was requiring too much time from network administrators.

Did Novell shoot itself in the foot? A NetworkWorld writer believes so.

What technology does a small business need, whether real estate office or dry cleaners or restaurant or muffler shop? What comes to mind first, thanks to Microsoft’s constant marketing, is a server. Since Novell shot itself in the foot so often it lost the majority share of the server market years ago, a server automatically means Microsoft to most people.

SCO

Novell is still hanging out in the courtroom with SCO. Mr. Cahn, the Trustee of SCO, is still inquiring to find out what goes on inside.

I have a friend whose theory of life is that when you are down to your last $100, rather than skimping, you should go out and spend it on a luxurious, wonderful meal, because afterwards you’ll think of something. SCO’s Chapter 11 Trustee must be a kindred spirit.

Mr. Cahn has filed with the bankruptcy court an application to hire a financial advisor/investment banker, Ocean Park Advisors, to advise him on what he should do about SCO. Should they reorganize, sell off and shut down or what? It’s complicated. Not to mention expensive. Wait. Does SCO have any money it doesn’t already owe to someone?

In a later post from Groklaw, Darl McBride’s criminal investigation is being responded to.

Here, the plaintiff wants to sue him and some other defendants, some of them in New York, over an alleged conspiracy hatched and at least partially executed in New York, according to the complaint. McBride is claiming that Pelican can’t sue him in New York State, since he says he has no connection to that state at all. Pelican claims he does, as I’ll show you, but it also claims the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act provides supplemental jurisdiction.

Virtualisation

Earlier this week we wrote about Novell's latest shot at Red Hat. This is still being mentioned in the context of Red Hat’s arrangement with Microsoft.

The agreement between Microsoft and Red Hat has significant implications for Novell. For a while Novell enjoyed a unique status in terms of being the only Linux partner that Microsoft has agreed to work with. And while the respective management frameworks offered by Microsoft and Novell are better integrated with their respective operating systems; that may not be a strong enough argument to get customer to give up their Red Hat distributions in favor of Suse Linux from Novell.

The author misses that point that Novell sold out by involving software patents and doing projects for Microsoft, whereas Red Hat’s deal is quite benign. There is more the subject here.

I recall a time not too long ago when Novell was the only Linux distro vendor playing ball with Microsoft. Of course, that was when both Linux companies were backing Xen for the long term.

Forbes has this new article on virtualisation myths. it was jointly written by David Convery, who holds Novell certification.

Mail

Someone has uploaded the following Novell commercial

GroupWise was mentioned in this article in relation to the BlackBerry and also mentioned in the following press release.

Research In Motion recently updated BlackBerry Enterprise IM Clients from v2.2 to v2.5 and includes clients for Novell GroupWise Messenger, IBM Lotus Sametime, and Microsoft’s Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007.

The old story about Los Angeles is being repeated in the following analysis.

Fed up with Novell e-mail software first installed in 1995 and dubbed “the slowest, most inefficient, crash-prone e-mail system in the history of mankind,” by the mayor’s office, LA city officials last year solicited bids for a modern replacement.

Security

Novell may be losing Los Angeles, but it has just gotten a contract in New York City. From the press release:

Novell today announced the City of New York has turned to Novell for improved integration of the city’s identity and security information technology infrastructure.

From another short report on the subject.

Jim Ebzery, senior vice president of identity and security management at Novell, said: “More than eight million New Yorkers use government services for a variety of daily needs. It is essential that the city’s agencies and systems not only operate efficiently but are protected against potential security risks. With Novell, the city can deliver simplicity and security to New Yorkers by providing a single digital identity that provides access to various city agencies.”

New York is to rely on Novell for security just as another vulnerability is found in Novell eDirectory, which is proprietary. In relation to Hotmail and Gmail intrusion, the following point was made:

Data Technique has developed a tool to integrate Gmail with Novell s eDirectory for account provisioning and management.

Identity Management

Identity is related to security and TMCNet delivers some fake reporting with a tweaked press releases, as usual. Novell is listed as part of the Liberty Alliance.

These vendors include Entrust, IBM (News – Alert), Microsoft, Novell, Ping Identity, SAP and Siemens.

Over at ZDNet UK, Novell also got mentioned as part of DMTF :

There are several cloud interoperability initiatives that are underway. In April, the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) formed an Open Cloud Standards Incubator (OCSI) group. This group’s board includes representatives from AMD, Cisco, Citrix, EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Novell, Red Hat, Savvis, Sun and VMware.

Additionally, there is this report from Hungary:

„IT systems’ continuous and secure operation and the compliance with the legislation and sector wise standards is an enormous task for the IT departments” – said Zsolt Hargitai, commercial support manager of Novell Magyarország. „Clients need a cost-saving and efficient soluton that works well with their existing systems while providing a safe infrastructure and the compliance as well,” – he added.

Novell’s Sentinel Log Manager helps them search efficiently through logs and the open source format makes it possible to store and archive data and reports on any available hardware, resulting in reduced compliance costs as well.

People

Novell will be speaking alongside IBM and Eric Schmidt was mentioned as Novell’s former head in a couple of places. Schmidt will speak in Utah.

Eric Schmidt came in from Novell (Nasdaq: NOVL).

Another former Novell officer was mentioned in The Chronicle.

Mr. Ricart’s arrival follows the six-year tenure of Tom West, LambdaRail’s first chief executive. Mr. Ricart has also founded three technology start-ups, served as Novell’s chief technology officer, and acted as the military’s technology liaison to the Clinton White House.

One last unimportant mention of Novell in relation to John Cruz:

John later developed video player add-ons for Macromedia Director and Novell development tools.

Partners

In India, Novell has launched a “PartnerNet” programme.

Novell will launch its global partner program-PartnerNet-in India in November, 2009. The revised version of this program was launched globally a year ago, to translate the company’s aggressive push of its open source solutions in the indirect channel space since 2008.

There is also a lookout for partners/customers in Australia:

Vasco has signed a distribution agreement with Sydney-based Novell specialist Open Channel Solutions (OCS).

Under the agreement, Novell’s largest Australian distie OCS will distribute Vasco’s full range of authentication products including Vasco’s Novell-certified range.

Novell makes friends in Scotland:

Indicia Training, which now employs six office based staff and a core of 15 freelance trainers, has seen turnover rise by 36% over the past two years to £550,000 this year. They are the only training company in Scotland to be awarded the Novell Gold Partner status – a much sought after industry accreditation – and can now count the likes of the Scottish Government, the NHS and Mars among its impressive client list.

In addition, Novell partners were mentioned mostly among lists of companies and some press releases.

Marketing

Grant Ho from Novell’s marketing team has just exploited another perceived problem in order to market Novell:

This may be good for a company that is only looking to manage their data center, but key questions remain — what’s going to happen to LANDesk, a subsidiary of Avocent? Will Emerson keep LANDesk? What’s going to happen to current LANDesk customers or future customers? What’s going to happen to LANDesk partners? Does Emerson’s focus on the data center mean it will get out of the endpoint management business? As a LANDesk customer or partner, I’m sure these are just a few of the questions you’re asking.

Not so long ago, Novell’s marketing team also used its "bloated" Linux remark as means of marketing SUSE Studio. How opportunistic. █

Summary: Musiwave terminated after Microsoft acquisition, security/identity integration delayed, search falls

A FEW days ago we showed that Microsoft eliminated two more products, followed by yet another. That’s a lot of dead products in less than one week and here is Microsoft merging another and eliminating an old service in the process.

To make matters worse, this report from IDG gives yet more examples of a bundle of existing delays.

Microsoft is on the verge of finally providing some pieces of software to back up its ambitious plan to integrate its security and identity technologies, but the company admits it is moving slower than it had anticipated.

Another undelivered promise is progress in search, the lack of which has had Microsoft lose billions of dollars.

The other day we wrote about figures from StatCounter. Although these cannot be verified, they do offer some relative insight into the continued failure of Microsoft in the search business. The report from IDG concentrates on US-only figures, as usual, as though this has more considerable impact then anything else which is measured.

The new numbers, compiled by online metrics firm StatCounter, show Bing dropping to 8.47 percent of the U.S. market in September. That’s a fall of 1.17 percent from its position in August.

From another source comes the estimate which shows Google exceeding 90% in global market share.

StatCounter also said global search share for Bing and Yahoo also declined. Bing slipped to 3.3 percent from 3.6 percent, while Yahoo dipped to 4.4 percent from 4.8 percent. Google’s global share remained at 90.5 percent.

That cannot make Microsoft particularly pleased. █

“Every time you use Google, you’re using a machine running the Linux kernel.”

–Chris DiBona, Google

“I’m going to f—ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I’m going to f—ing kill Google.”

–Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO

Summary: A weekly roundup of Novell news that excepts GNU/Linux (SUSE)

NOVELL’S channel is said to be broken, but the Var Guy listens to Novell’s chief marketing guy, who defends the channel nonetheless.

The VAR Guy: Has NOVL made any channel partner cuts in North America, elsewhere? If so, why and by how much?

Dragoon: Distribution in the Americas has been consistent year over year with the exception of adding Avnet as a Value Added Distributor. We have 5 relationships with Major Distributors in the Americas. (ATG/Arrow, Avnet, Tech Data, Synnex and Ingram).

Novell and SCO keep taking turns in court, but both companies may have a similar destination for putting their imaginary intellectual monopoly before their clients’ real needs.

Finance

Novell was mentioned in very few places in the financial press and weeks after its results, these results are still being compared quite repeatedly to Red Hat’s results. Novell claims that its “Linux” component is up, but Novell carries the weight of older products, so it is no Red Hat.

Virtualisation

A company near Novell deals with virtualisaion and here are Novell and PlateSpin listed separately in an article about it, despite residing under a common roof after an acquisition.

Surrey-based product and services supplier SGI holds accreditations with the likes of Microsoft, Dell, Novell, Citrix, VMware and PlateSpin.

[...]

Mark Shirman, chief executive at Massachusetts-based GlassHouse…

Mail

SKyCOM, which was mentioned here before [1, 2, 3], has released this second episode of a video that shows Novell GroupWise.

The following video has also been spread by Novell (uploaded again by Russell Dastrup, Novell’s Corporate Video person).

Novell’s PR people speak about it and the following item mentions GroupWise also.

The Mobile Intelligence application for BlackBerry smartphone works in conjunction with the BlackBerry Enterprise Server, which is compatible with all the leading messaging systems including: Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus Domino and Novell GroupWise.

Here is another case of Novell losing to Microsoft.

After a trial period by students and faculty, the new e-mail system was selected over other e-mail clients, including Novell, Zimbra, Mirapoint and Gmail.

On GroupWise support in instant-boot Linux:

And, it hooks into Microsoft Exchange, IMAP, POP and Novell GroupWise email, while delivering battery life that lasts for days, not hours. Many vendors are now offering instant boot options in laptops.

Identity Management

A press release was published which brings together many brands and companies.

Kantara Initiative and Liberty Alliance today announced that identity products from Entrust, IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Ping Identity, SAP and Siemens have passed Liberty Interoperable(TM) SAML 2.0 interoperability testing.

Here is the only bit of coverage that we could find about it:

System integrators and VARs who help enterprises with their identity and access management (IAM) initiatives received just a little bit more market clarity about the interoperability of seven major vendors’ products yesterday. The Kantara Initiative and Liberty Alliance announced IAM products from Entrust, IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Ping Identity, SAP and Siemens all passed the Liberty Interoperable SAML 2.0 test.

Novell’s PR people wrote about the general subject as well.

Security

Here is a new press release where Novell raves about receiving a high rank for sign-on software. At YouTube, new videos are said to demonstrate security problems with Novell products. NetWare is still being deployed nonetheless.

The university deployed a whole gamut of Trend Micro products including: OfficeScan Client/Server Edition and Internet Security Pro for laptops and off-campus PCs; ScanMail Suite for Lotus Domino for campus email server protection; ServerProtect for Microsoft Windows/Novell NetWare for file server protection; and Control Manager for administration.

People

A Novell executive gets his profile done by the Wall Street Journal where he brags about his house.

To build his driveway, Rick Crandall had workers import a million pounds of moss rock from Utah and spend six months erecting a 28-foot-high retaining wall that hugs his steep hillside, a process that took six months and $1 million.

In short, it was a challenge—exactly what the longtime computer executive likes. Chairman of Novell Inc., the open-source server software company, Mr. Crandall tackled the construction of his 8,250-square-foot home with the same patience and means he applies to his other idiosyncratic interests.

Here is a reminder of the fact that Dell employed senior people from Novell. We saw this before.

Dell channel chief Greg Davis recently hired a channel veteran, Nancy Reynolds (previously Trend Micro and Novell) to lead their enterprise channel strategy. And they are certainly investing in training, enablement and performance incentive programs for their growing number of channel partners. But, many solution providers still vow to never “partner” with Dell, citing their historic direct-only selling model and bias.

Partners

Novell tightens its relationship with Koenig, which is about certification and examination.

Koenig is proud to announce that Koenig is now Gold Training Partner for Novell as well as offers practicum testing for Novell Exams.

Gen-i turns out to be working “closely” with Novell.

“Gen-i’s effort in innovating IT in a grid-based supercomputing centre environment, leveraging cloud services model and virtual infrastructure enables real-time customer service delivery. By doing this, Gen-i has created a whole new commercial model based on the ability to create entirely self-contained environments for customers rapidly and easily,” Chief Technology Advisor for IDC’s Asia/Pacific Emerging Technology Council, Dr. Patrick Chan, said.

“Gen-i also differentiates in its ability to work closely with its vendor (Novell) to evolve its needs into the vendor offerings and help shape the next version of the vendor product,” he said.

Novell is mentioned in this press release about ManageSoft and also the announcement of this GFI-Katharion acquisition.

The GFI hosted and edge anti-spam and anti-virus filtering solutions will work with any mail structure including Microsoft, Novell, Apple, and Linux environments.

Marketing and Other Matters

Here is a keynote talk from Tracy Smith (Novell) and a call for “Novell IT rock stars,” courtesy of Novell’s marketing people.

The following marketing site has Troy Monney of Novell mentioned in the context of B2B marketing.

Michael Rapp, Manager of eMedia, Fujitsu Network Communications, and Troy Monney, VP of Global Marketing Execution, Novell, separately described their approach to creating these customer profiles. But both expressed the importance of avoiding unnecessary complexity in the persona-development process.

Novell ought to focus more on engineering and less on meta-industries like marketing, which produce nothing of real use. █

Summary: Roundup of Novell news from the past 7 days

IT has been another quiet week for Novell (also due to Labor [sic] Day), so this post might be worth skipping.

SCO

Groklaw has this new post with an AutoZone chart. Jones writes:

SCO hasn’t changed at all. It hasn’t backed off at all. The complaint, however, has changed, and the changes are to cover its back because the Utah District Court ruled that Novell didn’t transfer copyrights to Santa Cruz in 1995. At least that is how it strikes me. So it has added two copyrights to its list of registered copyrights, UNIX System V: release 4.2MP (the version that was highlighted in SCO v. Novell) and SCO OpenServer: release 5.0.5. That’s because SCO now alleges copyright infringement but also a contract claim related to OpenServer. The other thing that has changed since SCO filed this amended complaint is that SCO management has been replaced by the Chapter 11 trustee, and so we don’t know yet if this case will even go forward now. It’s up to him, not former management. However, you can see what they *would* have done, if it had been up to them, namely continue to sue Linux end users, not just AutoZone, and this was intended to be the template, I gather. They wanted this to be an object lesson: pay SCO for using Linux. Like I said, they haven’t changed at all.

The actual big news comes from Novell, which wants UNIX back (or rather, it wants to clarify that it indeed owns it).

Novell Files for Rehearing En Banc!

[...]

En banc means not just three judges, but all the appeals court judges. The filing is 78 pages, and we can read it together.

This may take a while.

Finance

We wrote a lot about Novell's financial results for the last quarter, but there are still some reports we have not covered or cited, such as this one or this newer one. Novell’s revenue continues to drop sharply, so downsizing may be needed.

Netware/Novell Directory Services

Users of Snot [sic] Leopard who depend on Netware are sort of stuck.

Snow Leopard – Novell (not for a while ) — Novell networks are not yet compatible with Snow Leopard, leading to suggestions for workarounds. (3 messages)

The full thread is here:

I discovered, to my chagrin, that our Novell network is NOT compatible with Snow Leopard – see <http://www.novell.com/products/openenterpriseserver/snowleopard.html>. Of course, we were told that IT would upgrade to Snow Leopard in December — now I know why. My workaround is to use RemoteDesktop to go to my Leopard computer and access the network. What I don’t understand is what changed in Snow Leopard that fowled Novell access?

Here is some IPX/SPX nostalgia from IDG:

When the Dreamcast debuted in September 1999, it took its cues from the PC. I played Doom on an IPX/SPX connection (an old Novell protocol) in 1994. Quake and Duke Nukem 3D followed on 33.6K and then 56K dial-up speeds in 1996. Remember Quake clans? Huge.

IDG also has this item about Directory Services:

It had taken me well over a year to get Network World to agree to this newsletter (I was already writing one called “Focus on Windows NT”) but, as I said in that first one: “With Microsoft ready to launch Active Directory in Windows 2000 and Novell soon to release Version 8 of Novell Directory Services, many vendors are jumping on the directory bandwagon. In this newsletter, we hope to be able to winnow the wheat from the chaff and point you towards the major milestones on the road to the directory-centric network.”

Virtualisation

Tech Data turns out to be distributing Platespin. We wrote about Novell’s new relationship with Tech Data in [1, 2].

Tech Data also expanded its arrangement with Novell Inc. to include the vendor’s PlateSpin products, which allows companies to extend their use of virtualization in the data center.

HP’s Solution Builder has some new virtualisation additions that relate to Novell through support.

At VMworld this week, HP announced innovative management and service solutions that extend the benefits of virtualization beyond servers to the entire infrastructure. The announcement included the HP Solution Builder program, which is being supported by Novell.

Jeff Jaffe uses marketing buzzwords like “Cloud” to promote more or less the same thing and so does Novell’s PR department, which speaks about “vCloud”. A lot of these things are proprietary and some — like Platespin — are arguably Windows-only. Here are some more new details about Platespin:

Once a startup, Platespin was acquired by Novell in March 2008 for $205 million, and Platespin gets good reviews at this engineer’s shop for its ability to create a virtual machines from Linux physical servers.

Mail

The impending migration (away from GroupWise) in Los Angeles has gotten the attention of the Microsoft-sponsored blog, which writes about whose money gets spent:

How L.A. would switch to Google Apps, using Microsoft’s money

A recent report from Los Angeles’ chief technology officer gives lots of details on a proposal to migrate the city to Google Apps — moving away from Novell Groupwise and, to a lesser extent, Microsoft Office.

A couple of videos have been added to YouTube and therein they promote GroupWise. The first one is about SKyCOM.

Here is the second new video.

GroupWise support was also mentioned in relation to the Apple iPhone, e.g. here:

NotifyLink provides users with wireless email and PIM synchronization combined with a set of mobile device management functionality. In addition, NotifyLink supports a variety of mobile devices in addition to the iPhone as well as a variety of email platforms including Novell’s GroupWise, Sun’s Java Communications Suite, Oracle’s OCS and Beehive Suites, Google’s Premiere Apps, Mirapoint’s Messaging Server, Alt-N’s MDaemon, People Cubes’s Meeting Maker and OpenText’s First Class. Last August Notify launched its initial NotifyLink support for the iPhone and iPod touch which included wireless synchronization of email and PIM (calendar and personal address book), global address lookup, and remote wipe, the company said.

Novell’s campus will be hosting a course for iPhone developers.

Izatt International today announced a new 3-day iPhone Developer Course to be held in Provo, Utah at the Novell Campus. The course will be Thursday-Saturday, October 8-10, 8:30am-5:30pm. An expert iPhone instructor will be covering the new iPhone 3.0 SDK, beginning with the basics plus covering exciting new topics such as the new MapKit and accessing the user’s iTunes library.

Identity Management/Authentication

In another proprietary area of Novell, SecureLogin 7 makes an appearance.

Novell today announced the availability of Novell SecureLogin 7, the latest release of its industry-leading enterprise single sign-on (SSO) solution. Novell(R) SecureLogin 7 drastically reduces the time required to SSO-enable the applications in an organization from weeks to days–allowing customers immediate advantages from improved productivity and operational efficiency.

This does not seem to have been covered by the press, just this press release. There is one exception though:

Novell today launched the latest version of its SecureLogin product, which it claims can reduce the traditional burden associated with integrating single sign-on systems with enterprise packages.

Here is another related article from the same publication:

This has been achieved by enabling the devices’ user databases to synchronise directly with Lightweight Directory Access Protocol directories, such as Microsoft’s Active Directory and Novell’s eDirectory, to ensure that both sets of information are automatically updated.

Security

Novell’s iPrint Client has a new flaw, but there seems to be no additional coverage about it. Processor.com has meanwhile quoted a Novell employee on the subject of security.

David Ferre, product manager for endpoint security at Novell (www.novell.com), agrees. “In a recent study, 53% of respondents said that they wouldn’t be able to determine what data was lost if they lost track of a USB device,” he says. “If companies don’t encrypt, that mobility that is so prized can become a threat to the health of the enterprise.”

People

The head of Managed Objects left Novell quite recently and there is finally formal coverage about it.

Giunta was CEO of McLean-based Managed Objects since 1999. Giunta built Managed Objects from a pre-revenue startup 10 years ago to its $50 million sale to Novell last year, she said.

Giunta replaces USinternetworking Inc. veteran Michael Harper at the helm of the Glenwood, Md. company in Howard County.

Here is another new page about Managed Objects.

A CRM excellence award gets granted to Callidus Software, whose connection to Novell we covered in [1, 2, 3].

Technology Marketing Corporation’s (TMC), www.tmcnet.com, Customer Interaction Solutions(R) magazine (www.cismag.com) awarded Callidus Software for the deployment of TrueComp(R) Manager software solution at Novell Inc. Callidus Software was recognized for its efforts and success in delivering measurable business improvements to Novell.

Another Novell member of staff is spotted in the news (IDG):

This 31-year-old software engineer has been working with and coaching remote teams at companies like JP Morgan, 3M, Nortel and Hewlett-Packard since 2001. He’s currently a consulting engineer working for Novell (remotely from Cambridge, Mass.) and looking for a publisher for his book, The One Minute Commute. (Learn more at www.zackgrossbart.com.)

Partners

Almost nothing here, except for a couple of press releases that mention Novell connections. As we warned at the start, there’s nothing fascinating going on at Novell these days. █

Summary: Novell news that pertains mostly to the proprietary side of Novell

Channel

NOVELL made some very big changes in its UK channel recently. Sean McCarry is running the company [1, 2] after the departure of Jacqueline de Rojas and Channel Pro, a UK-based Web site, has this new report about the subject.

Avnet has signed a deal to distribute Novell’s entire portfolio of datacentre, identity and security management, and end-user computing solutions.

[...]

Sean McCarry, country manager, Novell UK, added, “The channel is vital to our success in the UK, and we are committed to working and investing resources with the most suitable partners and distributors to ensure customers receive the best possible service.”

SCO

There have been no real developments on the case, but AutoZone filed some documents and Groklaw reveals that SCO might be hiring a lawyer to take a more independent look at the company. Does SCO have any money left at all?

SCO’s new Chapter 11 trustee, Edward N. Cahn, would like to hire a law firm, Blank Rome. Well, honestly speaking, wouldn’t *you* want a lawyer, if you were chosen to decide what to do next with the SCO Group?

Todd Weiss, writing for the Linux Foundation’s site, could not receive a response from SCO:

A spokesman for SCO could not immediately be reached for comment.

Jeffrey Neuburger, an attorney with Proskauer Rose LLP in New York, wrote a blog entry last week on the most recent court rulings, arguing that it “it remains to be seen whether SCO will survive to press forward with the Novell and other litigations.”

In an interview, Neuburger said that “[six] years later, we still don’t know who owns the rights to UNIX.”

“In this case, nothing surprises anyone anymore,” Neuburger said. “This is an exceptional case, partly because of the tenacity of SCO. Their [poor] financial situation exacerbates it. Then the fact that it involves open source adds a focus or attention that might not have been there, plus whenever you involve a company like IBM or Novell that also adds interest.”

Conspiracy theorists have also been watching the case, often questioning how Microsoft Corp. would have been involved behind the scenes, backing SCO against rivals, Neuburger said. “It all adds a lot of attention.”

Finance

Novell’s latest financial results are still receiving some coverage. Heise says that “sales decline at Novell”, but CRN looks at it from a more positive angle.

Product revenue from Identity, Access and Compliance Management products declined by 16 per cent to $28 million. Systems and Resource Management revenue came in at $40 million, down 15 per cent compared to last year, and sales of workgroup products declined by 12 per cent, coming in at $81 million.

Some remark about the role of SUSE, even though it is still just a small component of Novell’s ovrall revenue. For example, we have:

i. OStatic: “Is Linux Enough for Novell and Red Hat to Thrive?”

While Novell’s report yesterday that its quarterly Linux revenue soared 22 percent year-over-year was a positive note, and one that was expected, the real upshot of the company’s earnings report was that every other part of its business sank. Overall, its revenues slipped to $216 million for the quarter, compared to $245 million for the comparable quarter last year. Despite the company’s drum pounding about the promise and growth of its Linux business, Novell is a public company that needs revenues to come from more than one aspect of its business.

ii. Ovum: “Novell needs to turn Linux into a foundation for growth”

Novell recently revealed its third-quarter fiscal 2009 results. Although there were no big surprises, the continuing weakness of its overall licence revenues coupled with poor performances from its identity and security management (ISM) as well as systems and resource management (SRM) businesses does not bode well for the future.

iii. Linux Magazine: “Novell Still Profits with Linux”

Just a year ago, proprieters of Suse Linux reported a loss of 15 million dollars. For this reason, Novell cut spending. Jobs fell prey to this spending cut, in addition to the annual fair Brainshare for 2009. The enterprise also axed involvement with the Cebit exhibition for the year.

Coverage around the time of the results was mostly positive as long as the sharp revenue drop got ignored. Novell’s stock did not respond well and Novell’s 7% fall in share value is still being mentioned.

Novell Inc. fell the most in the S&P 500, losing 7 percent to $4.38. The maker of Linux operating-system software posted adjusted quarterly profit of 7 cents a share, missing the average analyst estimates by 4.1 percent, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

It went on for another few days, but it was not just Novell.

Novell, Inc (NOVL) lost 2.7% or 13 cents to $4.58 after the business software maker said third quarter revenues fell 12% to $216.1 million from $245.2 million a year ago. Net income in the quarter was $16.7 million or 5 cents per diluted share compared to net loss of $15.1 million or 4 cents per share a year ago.

More about Novell’s results:

Novell, Inc, the business software maker said third quarter revenues fell 12% to $216.1 million from $245.2 million a year ago. Net income in the quarter was $16.7 million or 5 cents per diluted share compared to net loss of $15.1 million or 4 cents per share a year ago.

This return to profitability comes with shrinkage of Novell.

Novell has reported net income of $16.65m for the third quarter of 2009, compared to a net loss of $15.12m in the year-ago quarter. Revenue declined 12% to $216.08m.

Another last take:

Software solutions provider Novell Inc. (NOVL) reported a swing to profit in the third quarter on lower expenses, despite a 11.7% decline in revenues, hurt by weak revenues from software licenses, and services. Both earnings and revenues, however, were in line with estimates. Looking ahead, Novell also said it continues to see double-digit non-GAAP operating margins for the full fiscal year 2009, barring unforeseen circumstances.

Virtualisation

Novell was mentioned in this press release about virtualisation and also in this one from Xen/Citrix (Novell’s PR people add to the hype).

Xen.org advisory board members such as Citrix, HP, Intel, Novell and Oracle have already voiced their support for the XCP initiative…

The Register mentioned Novell in relation to VMware:

The battle for virtualizing x64 servers in the data center is pitting many variants of the open source Xen hypervisor (including versions from commercial Linux distros Red Hat and Novell as well as freestanding versions from Citrix Systems, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems) against VMware’s ESX Server hypervisor and, increasingly, Microsoft’s Hyper-V.

All in all, Novell’s role in virtualisation remains rather minor. Red Hat and KVM received far more coverage this week, but only owing to Red Hat’s summit.

Mail and Collaboration

GroupWise is mentioned in some places as a supported option, but apart from that, in the City of Los Angeles at least, GroupWise loses its footing.

In reference to a contract to supply e-mail and productivity apps to the City of Los Angeles that Google has more or less won, at Microsoft’s and Novell’s expense, Matt Glotzbach, director of product management for Google’s enterprise group, recently said that Google’s competitors — read Microsoft — appear to have had a role in spreading misinformation to delay or prevent Google from getting the city contract.

GroupWise is also being rejected by users at Portsmouth University (UK).

Nearly 30,000 students at the University of Portsmouth have rejected the university’s internal e-mail system in favour of Google Apps to communicate and collaborate with friends and tutors and stay in touch with friends and staff.

A spokesperson for the university said students would not log on to the university’s Novell GroupWise e-mail system. “They are missing important e-mails and notices, but they will not give up their Hotmail or Gmail accounts,” she said.

When it comes to collaboration software, Novell is mentioned among the leaders right here.

# Novell: The company’s Feb. 2008 acquisition of SiteScape brought the company beyond email and calendaring — its core competencies — and more into the collaboration space. Novell subsequently rebranded SiteScape as Novell Teaming. Forrester notes that the latest release of Teaming adds solid social tools to “very strong capabilities for workspaces and collaborative application development, particularly in the area of workflow.”

Identity Management and Security

Some hospitals in the UK appear to be relying on Novell’s identity management systems. Here is a new report about mid-Yorkshire hospitals:

The Trust, which has around 7000 employees, is now able to link to the NHS’s Electronic Staff Records providing up-to-date, ‘same day’ information on ‘leavers’ and ‘joiners’ to the organisation via Novell Identity Manager. This is not only saving time and resources spent on manual administration, but is ensuring that the system holds up-to-date and accurate information.

[...]

The Solution takes advantage of the Novell Enterprise Agreement that was signed with Connecting for Health (CFH) in 2005, enabling Mid Yorkshire to benefit from licenses purchased centrally for Novell Identity Manager and Novell Enhanced SmartCard Login (NESCM) as well as full product training.

There is also a similar story from the south:

South London and the Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust is using Novell Identity Manager to manage the user accounts of more than 8,000 staff.

The following new audiocast speaks about “security assurance and trust in cloud computing.” It is part of Novell’s PR efforts.

People and Partners

The Worcester Business Journal has this little piece about Sameer Bhat, a man behind eClinicalWorks. He used to work at Novell beforehand.

Career highlights: I began my career at Integra Microsystems, where I served as a lead engineer for developing web-based document management software, later moving to Novell Inc. to develop applications for remote desktop and network management. Both of these positions helped lay the groundwork for eClinicalWorks.

Novell’s relationships with other companies are also mentioned in some promotional pieces, including the usual bunch from Autonomy.

Misc.

A second edition of a guide titled “Convergenomics” is being put together for publication and Novell turns out to have played a role in it.

The latest edition includes new contributions from key ecosystem participants, including BLADE Network Technologies, Brocade, Fulcrum, Juniper Networks, Novell and Oracle, in addition to previous contributions from Cisco, EMC, Panduit, Scalent Systems and VMware.

In this new roundup about certifications, Novell’s SUSE certification receives a mention.

Novell Releases SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 Certification
Novell recently released new versions of its Novell Certified Linux Administrator (CLA) and Novell Certified Linux Professional (CLP) designations keyed to SUSE Linux Enterprise 11. As part of this, they are offering the CLA exam at 25% off (use promotional code CLA112009 when you register at Pearson VUE) through the end of 2009. The regular price is $125. The CLP 11 exam is not available yet. CLA objectives can be found on Novell’s CLA web page.

Over the past year or so there has been little news of considerable substance coming from Novell. This week’s summary serves to reinforce this belief. And it’s no summer vacation anymore. █

Summary: All the rest of the news about Novell

There is nothing significant to see here this week, but what follows is a quick summary of minor things.

SCO

No interesting developments here since the last report. Groklaw has a couple more posts, the latter of which suggests that this saga ain’t over for at least another year (the AutoZone trial).

Finance

We won’t be following financial news as much as we used to. With the Yahoo!-Microsoft deal actually signed, we no longer read the relevant Yahoo! RSS feeds. Here is one minor report from last week.

Tech stocks finished the day lower. Microsoft, Novell and Oracle lost 1.5%, 1.2% and 1.6% respectively.

Older/Proprietary Technology

YouTube has this new video of Zen and IDG wrote about Zenworks.

“This is seamless to the end user,” he said. “And it is integrated with Active Directory policies, and supports Novell Zenworks through group policy. This means that no back-end infrastructure is needed to deploy this across the enterprise.”

Novell’s eDirectory was mentioned very briefly in ZDNet.

Information about people is stored and referenced using directory servers. There are plenty of these around, including IBM’s Tivoli Directory Server, Microsoft’s Active Directory and Novell’s eDirectory

Virtualisation

Novell’s PlateSpin Protect 8.1 made this appearance and it looks like news indeed.

Novell announced the availability of PlateSpin Protect 8.1. With PlateSpin Protect 8.1 customers can protect and restore whole workloads, from both physical servers and virtual machines, up to 50 percent faster than before, shrinking backup windows and reducing the time needed to restore systems after an outage.

More in CBR:

Novell has refreshed its PlateSpin management line so that tools used to restore workloads from physical and virtual machines in the data centre can do so up to 50% faster than previous versions.

“Up to 50% faster” may also mean 5% faster, on average. This language requires skepticism. Novell is mentioned as a virtualisation contender by InfoWorld and it is listed by IT Jungle too.

But Handy says that over time, IBM will support the Xen hypervisor (pushed mostly by Citrix Systems and Oracle with some interest from Novell) and the KVM hypervisor (championed by Red Hat as an alternative to Xen on X64 iron); it will also support logical partitions on Power Systems servers running atop PowerVM and supporting i, AIX, and Linux. Exactly when is not clear. But there is a clear need for the software.

Novell remains recognised in this field despite being a minor player with minuscule market share. The lion’s share of this market is still VMware’s. We may have some fraud to report regarding this company in weeks to come.

Mail

GroupWise is mentioned in this bit about MessageSolution and also in this one and that one.

Additionally we have:

i. Twitter breach revives security issues with cloud computing

Under the $7.25 million plan, the city will transition its Novell GroupWise e-mail and Microsoft Office applications to Google’s e-mail and office productivity products starting this December. The migration is expected to save the city more than $6 million in software license costs over the next five years and an additional $7.5 million from reallocating resources dedicated to GroupWise to other tasks.

ii. Novell promotes email efficiency for customers and staff

Novell (NASDAQ:NOVL) trained its staff Tuesday on how to use GroupWise software more efficiently. GroupWise is the company’s collaboration and productivity platform. It includes both client and server software.

On Collaboration:

iii Collaboration Tools Can Cut Costs, Boost Productivity

Even with software investments trending down, collaboration tools may be worth a look for increased productivity, contained costs and a reduced carbon footprint. Cisco, IBM, Microsoft and Novell are pushing into the market, but open-source solutions are also available. Collaboration tools can even boost customer relations and revenue.

[...]

“Providing employees with collaboration tools that enable them to work together effectively, no matter where they may be located, is no longer a wish-list or nice-to-have item — it’s a requirement,” said Kent Erickson, senior vice president and general manager of Workgroup Solutions for Novell.

Management & Security

Not so long ago we mentioned Burton and Novell because they were going to meet up from Wednesday to Friday [1, 2]. Novell’s PR people mentioned it some days ago.

Both organizations will preview capabilities of Novell Cloud Security Service during an industry-wide interoperability demonstration at Burton Group Catalyst Conference, Wednesday, July 29, 2009 at the Hilton San Diego Bayfront.

From the Burton Group’s gig, quite a few press releases came. Among those that mentioned Novell:

i. eXpresso(TM) Corp Showcases Cloud-based Single Sign-On and Interoperability at Burton Group Catalyst Conference

Recognizing the ongoing interest enterprises have in utilizing off-premise applications, the Burton Group has invited leading identity providers such as CA, Novell, Sun, TriCipher and Ping Identity as well as live SaaS application environments such as eXpresso, Salesforce, Google Apps and Cisco WebEx to wire together their systems using nothing but standard identity protocols and the Internet. The end result will be a showcase of secure interoperability in the cloud for attendees at the Burton Group conference to witness first-hand.

ii. New Log Management Solution from Novell Delivers a Key Building Block for Security and Regulatory Compliance

Novell, Inc. today announced a comprehensive log management solution that expands the functionality offered in Novell’s security information and event management solutions. Novell(R) Sentinel(TM) Log Manager simplifies fulfillment of audit requirements and improves security by streamlining the management of ever-increasing volumes of raw event data used for risk investigations and compliance reporting.

iii. Novell Tackles Cloud Computing Security

At the Burton Group Catalyst Conference this week, Novell plans to demonstrate Novell Cloud Security Service, which is designed to secure Cloud-based and Software as a Service (SaaS) services. The company’s effort underscores the continuing concern that as cloud services gain attention because of their potential business benefits, they may be outstripping their own security capabilities.

iv. PivotLink Eliminates the Security Barriers to Cloud-Based Business Intelligence

Novell separately announced it will demonstrate the Novell Cloud Security Service with PivotLink during the event. The solution allows PivotLink to extend its security model by integrating PivotLink’s application and data level security into the overall framework.

Then came some more news about Sentinel, which Novell’s PR people wrote about.

Today we announced a comprehensive log management solution that expands the functionality offered in Novell’s security information and event management solutions. Novell Sentinel Log Manager simplifies fulfillment of audit requirements and improves security by streamlining the management of ever-increasing volumes of raw event data used for risk investigations and compliance reporting.

More on Sentinel (from the news):

i. Novell aims to tighten cloud security

Novell has unveiled a cloud-computing identity and access management service, designed to extend corporate security policies to hosted facilities.

On Wednesday, Novell demonstrated an advanced prototype of its Cloud Security Service, which is due for release to enterprise organisations as a product early in 2010.

Novell said the new service, which has been in a private joint-development phase with hosting partners, is based on existing components used in its Access Manager, Sentinel and Identity Manager products.

ii. Novell gets into log management

The Novell Sentinel Log Manager is designed to simplify auditing and bolster security by streamlining the management of raw event data used for risk investigations and compliance reporting for regulations such as HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley and PCI DSS.

People

Novell participated in the following webinar, but names of people seem to be entirely missing.

Agiliance Inc., the leader in integrated Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC), today announced it will host a live webinar titled “FTC RED FLAGS: Are You Ready?” on August 6, 2009 at 2:00 PM EDT featuring distinguished panelists from Novell, Rick Wagner, Rook Consulting, Jim Anderson and hosted by Ed King, vice president of marketing, Agiliance.

A new IDG Webcast features Ross Chevelier from Novell:

Join Ross Chevelier, CTO for Novell Americas, to discuss key IT consolidation drivers….

Chevelier does some more talking elsewhere, as advertised by the notorious Sys-Con.

…Ross Chevalier, CTO for Novell Americas and President for Novell Canada, will be presenting at the upcoming Government IT Conference & Expo (www.GovITExpo.com) this coming October 6th in Washington, DC.

A new hire emits details about another former Novell employee:

Blount’s experience at Novell and JD Edwards, where he led the strategic acquisition of over a dozen technology companies, complemented by his recent successful turnaround and strategic merger of Dynix Corp., demonstrates his vision and success in acquisition growth strategies and his ability to convert those acquisitions into successful, long-term growth.

Partners/Relationships

A few commercial relationships were mentioned here and here, but that’s a lot less than average.

Marketing

Novell’s chief marketing guy raves about Novell as a support site.

For many clients, support is the make or break attribute of a positive or negative software experience. Our technical support teams get this and it’s why I’m very proud that for the third consecutive year, The Association of Support Professionals has announced Novell as a winner of their “Ten Best Support Sites”. This prestigious award highlights excellence in online service and support.

Promotional Novell videos continue to be pushed into YouTube, usually by the company. The latest additions:

And another Novell commercial:

Here ends another quiet week. █

THERE are many news articles listed here, but none are important in the sense that they really change much. For those who insist on reading on, we only warn that it might be dull.

Misc.

The first report that we deal with suggests that Novell might be dumped for Google in the City of Los Angeles, California. Google is also based in California, but this is unlikely to be related.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was asked on Friday to weigh potential privacy and security risks before allowing the City of Los Angeles to ditch Microsoft and Novell for Google.

Forrester, of Microsoft infamy, wrote about office suites and mentioned Novell as a sleeping contender.

Can Office 2010 save the franchise? Or will a simpler, better customer experience from Google draw in a bigger audience before next summer? And what does it mean for the bit players, independents, and sleepers like the Open Office suites from IBM/Lotus, Novell, and Sun, or for Adobe, Zoho, Thinkfree, Corel …

Finance

Novell’s stock is not doing too badly. As the market fluctuates, Novell continues to be mentioned every now and then. See for example:

i. Overnight MarketWatch

Tech stocks made ground with Microsoft, IBM and Apple putting on 1%, 0.9% and 0.8% respectively. Hewlett-Packard gained 1.1%, while Novell and Oracle shed 1.4% and 1.1%.

ii. Market Winners & Losers: AIG, CIT

Novell Inc. (NOVL)
Novell closed the session down 1.2% to start the week, bucking sector trends. NOVL last traded at $4.21, a loss of 5 cents on the day.

iii. Market Winners & Losers: Starbucks, Allegheny Technologies

Novell Inc. (NOVL)

The software company helped keep the Nasdaq in positive territory Wednesday, with shares closing up 7.1%. NOVL last traded at $4.68, a gain of 31 cents on the day.

Netware

Novell’s Netware was mentioned almost nowhere except this new page about the Lexmark C736dn.

Fortunately, software setup is much more straightforward and the drivers for PCL 6 and Postscript Level 3, both in emulation, together with a monitoring applet, install easily. This printer has drivers available for Windows from 2000 onwards, OSX, a wide range of Linux variants, Novell NetWare and Sun, HP and IBM versions of UNIX. There aren’t many places this printer won’t fit.

A new Web filtering product has Novell mentioned in the accompanying press release.

LDAP Synchronization with Novell eDirectory (Novell NetWare 6.5) – Netsweeper can now use the LDAP protocol to access your Novell eDirectory group and user information, such that changes to an eDirectory management system automatically update the Netsweeper user and group database. (Previously, Netsweeper could only synchronize with Active Directory users and groups through LDAP.)

Virtualisation

The news about PlateSpin migration is a little antiquated by now, but here are Novell’s PR people bringing PlateSpin back to the centre.

Business Service Manager 4.6 also marks a milestone in the integration of Novell’s PlateSpin workload and virtualization management solutions with our business service management solutions — a new PlateSpin Recon adapter is now available for customers to integrate PlateSpin virtualization information into the Business Service Manager analytical and dashboard environment.

[...]

In addition, Business Service Manager 4.6 has added support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11, as well as Microsoft Windows 2008 Server.

ITWeb fell behind somewhat, so only days ago it covered the announcement about PlateSpin Migrate.

The company said Platespin Migrate 8.1 is a significant update for customers using Solaris Containers, a form of operating system-level virtualisation.

Novell was mentioned in more articles regarding virtualisation, but mostly as just a minor player, e.g. in:

i. Microsoft Vs VMware: A ‘cloud’ war of Titans?

Some call VMware a one-trick pony trying to joust with a giant in the backyard. Some say, it’s a stallion that will only get stronger as it sweats it out in the real race. So are we sniffing a Novell Vs Microsoft deja vu even as both the companies are surrounded with technology, customer and competition troubles on their own. We try to understand all that and more in this ‘twin plate’. Bringing both the rivals together as they prefer not to answer direct questions about each other.

ii. Big Blue animates VM control freak

Look out, VMware. And Citrix Systems. And Microsoft. And Red Hat. And Novell. And Oracle. Here comes IBM crashing the server virtualization management party.

iii. REVIEW: Citrix XenServer 5.5 Is a Good Choice for Cash-Strapped Organizations

With Version 5.5, XenServer now offers support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 and Debian Lenny. XenCenter also now provides a view that puts resources such as physical hosts, virtual machines, snapshots and storage repositories into folders, and resources can be tagged to create groupings of resources for reporting purposes.

iv. Citrix: A long run to VMware

Citrix is playing the best hand it can put together, just like Novell. Time will tell if either of them can take on their respective opposing juggernauts and make a real run for the money, not just a technical race.

v. Green Subsidies For SaaS

In practice, this means that the purchase of software for virtualization from vendors like VMware ( VMW – news – people ), Citrix and Novell ( NOVL – news – people ) as well as thin client technology from Sun Microsystems ( JAVA – news – people ) is being subsidized by these programs. The logic behind the subsidies is that companies should be given assistance and incentives to make investments that permanently reduce the amount of energy they use.

Mail

There was nothing about GroupWise this time around, but GWAVA made a couple of appearances:

i. GWAVA Announces GWAVACon EMEA in 2009

GWAVA is pleased to announce that registration is now open for its GWAVACon conference in Berlin October 17-19, 2009. Early bird pricing is available through August 15th.

ii. GWAVA Releases Retain 1.7 With Free Stubbing Edition

GWAVA is pleased to announce a new release of its popular Retain product. As part of this release, GWAVA is offering a free stubbing edition of Retain for any customers wishing to try the stubbing technology. Retain is GWAVA’s email archiving and retention software designed for Novell GroupWise.

Management

According to eWeek, Novell enters fog computing with identity and access management (also mentioned here).

Novell is unveiling a cloud-based security service to perform identity and access management for hosted applications and hosted storage. The vendor plans to unveil the technology next week at a conference in San Diego.

On a similar or at least related matter, Novell’s Alan Murray gets quoted in here:

“Today’s data centers are heterogeneous environments with multiple masters and stakeholders, but in order for any organization to make decisions or analyze business performance these mixed environments need to work together simply and seamlessly,” said Alan Murray, vice president of product management at Novell. “Novell is a strong supporter of the Configuration Management Database Federation (CMDBf) standard, because it facilities the interoperability of data from multiple points of view. With a comprehensive view of the entire IT environment, administrators can utilize configuration data to streamline management tasks, resolve issues and, most importantly, effectively manage the components in their IT infrastructure.”

Security

The Burton Group is no reputable entity, but this does not prevent Novell from hooking up with it.

Novell will unveil the industry’s first cloud computing security service that provides identity and access management for hosted applications and hosted storage, as well as a compliance reporting suite, at the upcoming Burton Group Catalyst Conference, July 29 – 31 in San Diego. Based on more than 60 cloud-related patents and patent applications, the Novell(R) Cloud Security Service enables Cloud Providers and Software as a Service (SaaS) vendors to ensure their offerings meet the strict security and compliance standards required by global businesses.

A vulnerability recently discovered in Novell Access Manager is still giving them a lot of flak.

Bad news was reported regarding Novell Access Manager. A vulnerability has been discovered in this software program. Remote attackers with an aim to compromise a vulnerable system, could exploit this vulnerability and obtain unauthorized access to arbitrary files and sensitive information on the system.

People

There are many things happening here. First of all, Novell’s PR people brag about Justin Steinman, who is in marketing.

Novell marketing guru Justin Steinman has just been named a finalist for the 2009 Mass Technology Leadership Council’s Leadership Awards in the Emerging Executives category. The Leadership Awards honor Massachusetts companies and individuals who best exemplify leadership and excellence in business and technology.

This is also mentioned here, here, and here.

We also find former Novell employees making their move, e.g.:

i. New Management Team for Search Engine Factory, SurfRay

Board Member Ken Tomassen is Managing Director of Novell in Denmark, Finland, Norway and The Middle East. Prior to his career at Novell, which began in 2004, he worked for IBM Software Group for 10 years where he was responsible for software sales in Denmark and key accounts in the Nordic Region. He was also stationed in Paris with responsibility for software sales to SMBs in EMEA.

ii. Download DABCC Live Episode 2: Aternity Optimizing Virtual Reality – Desktop Virtualization Management and Monitoring Webinar

Before joining InterSystems, Matz was president and CEO of Route Link for eight years, a leading systems integration and groupware development company that he founded and managed. Prior to founding Route Link, he was vice president of Mashov Computers, the exclusive Novell distributor in Israel, where he was responsible for Novell’s Israeli operations. His background includes more than twenty years of technical, marketing and sales management experience in the IT industry.

iii. S2 Intelligence’s McCabe joins KPMG

McCabe has advised 90 of Australia’s top 100 corporations and state and federal governments. He started his career in marketing and management roles with IBM and Novell before moving into research with IDC and Gartner. He started S2 Intelligence in 2002.

iv. Karl Strauss and GreenHouse Partner to Create Alternative Fuel from Beer Waste

EFuel is run by Tom Quinn, the inventor of the Nintendo Wii controller and former President of Novell. The Company also offers consumers effective home improvement products that not only improve the environment, but also reduce energy bills and maintenance expenses. The company offers a diverse product line that includes ‘on-site, off-the-grid’ power plants, Envision Solar, GreenFiber insulation, CoolWall exterior coating, and several lines of energy-efficient windows.

One notable move occurs at Univa (also listed here) where EMEA leadership will have roots at Novell.

Malaperiman has over 15 years experience in technology strategy and sales for some of the most successful IT companies in existence, including VMware and Novell. As head of Univa’s operations in EMEA, Patrick Malaperiman will oversee strategic business and sales in these key regions, where Univa is experiencing significant increases in demand.

More here.

Malaperiman has over 15 years experience in technology strategy and sales for IT companies, including VMware and Novell. As head of Univa’s operations in EMEA, Patrick Malaperiman will oversee strategic business and sales in these key regions, where Univa is experiencing increases in demand.

Dell gets a small portion of Novell staff as well.

So the hiring of Reynolds, who has spent 17 years in channel operations at Novell, Trend Micro and Palo Alto Networks, could very well signal a change for Dell—one that shows that Dell really is serious about adding professionals with channel DNA to the team.

A reference to Eric Schmidt at Novell appears at Information Week:

For business users, however, the story has been much different. Microsoft has used its operating system dominance to create what’s been an elegant and unrivaled marriage of office productivity applications, e-mail, and now collaboration with SharePoint. Google CEO Eric Schmidt has done this dance with Microsoft during his stints at Sun and Novell and knows better than to take on Microsoft at the business user’s desktop.

Novell people will participate in the Bomgar Roadshow (also found here).

“The Bomgar Roadshow agenda has been designed to drive efficiency and manage web-based support initiatives in demanding times. Participating in this event are executive members from Novell, Bomgar, Enterprise Management Associates and the CIO community. For individuals looking to address industry concerns and maximize the business value of peer-to-peer discussions, the roadshows will provide the resources and opportunity to gain significant business value,” said Glenn Willis, EVP, CIO Roadshows.

Partners

Novell IT tests are go a little further.

The Pearson VUE advanced computer-based testing system administers exams for leading IT certification programs such as Cisco®, CompTIA®, Citrix®, Novell® and others through a global network of quality test centers.

A company called Search Laboratory turns out to be working for Novell on subverting search engines.

Search Laboratory, whose clients include Novell, Jet2.com, TSG and LifeSize, was chosen after the company was able to demonstrate its expertise in Business to Business search marketing.

Novell is mentioned in the context of Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) and it also participates in (and is thus mentioned in) the new lobby for FOSS in the United States. Novell’s PR people mentioned this the other day.

Minor mentions of Novell (mostly in press releases of other companies) can be found here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Video

Technical videos continue to be thrown onto YouTube. This new one comes from an obscure user, but NovellServices, which is a Novell account, has just put up there some more tutorials, namely:

• Novell Support Advisor 1.1
• 2009 07 21 1436 Zen 10 Configuration Mgmt
• 2009 07 21 1416 Zen10 Patch Management

Next week will be interesting for Novell because of the bankruptcy proceedings of SCO. █

Summary: A grouping of Novell news from the past 7 days

AS we showed last week, Novell is offshoring some workforce in a move whose value exceeds $100 million.

Novell’s Jeff Jaffe finally wrote about this too, not just the PR department of Novell. They really try to characterise it as a good thing (well, to investors it might be) and there is coverage in some more places, for example:

i. ACS wins $135m Novell contract

IT services provider Affiliated Computer Services has won a five-year $135m contract from Novell to provide IT operations, SAP consulting, applications development and maintenance, and system integration services.

ii. ACS, Novell in strategic tie-up

Affiliated Computer Services (ACS) and Novell have entered into a strategic partnership to expand their core technical capabilities and suite of services.

As per the deal, Novell will outsource part of its internal IT operations to ACS which will also provide SAP consulting and applications development and maintenance system integration services as part of a $135m, five-year contract.

Both the companies will each invest in joint engineering, technology, sales and marketing initiatives. Besides, during the first three years, ACS would partner with Novell to enhance its global data centre operations and will purchase approximately $30m in Novell products.

iii. Novell signs two part data center deal with ACS

Affiliated Computer Services is to take over the running of Novell’s data center operations in Provo, Utah as part of a global services deal which will see the outsourcer take Novell’s data center products to market.

SCO

While Novell offshores its Utah-based workforce, SCO fights to keep what remains of it (roughly in the same area). It is hoping to block its ultimate death (liquidation).

The SCO Group of Lindon is locked in a death grip with IBM and Novell, left to hope a favorable appeals court ruling comes down before a hearing in which a bankruptcy judge could order the company liquidated.

Novell and IBM have petitioned a federal bankruptcy court in Delaware to order the liquidation of the Utah company with which they have been in lawsuits for years over issues related to the ownership of computer software code.

The issues are important because SCO sued IBM in 2003 claiming the computer giant had placed code in the Linux computer operating software that allowed Linux to successfully compete for business clients against SCO’s Unix software. Then SCO sued Novell after the Waltham, Mass.-based company claimed that it, not SCO, owned the Unix copyrights at issue in the IBM case.

SJVN shares what he thinks will happen “when SCO is dead and buried.”

As Pamela Jones, editor of Groklaw, points out, SCO appears to be heading towards Chapter 7 Bankruptcy. For those of you who don’t know, Chapter 7 can be thought of as the Go to Jail card in the game Monopoly. “Go directly to Jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.” Or, go out of business; do not come back; please leave the plumbing in the restrooms on your way out the door.

But now what? Novell owns Unix. There’s still some good stuff left in there that isn’t duplicated in Linux.

Some of the comments on this article attack SJVN personally. These could be coming from anonymous accounts of SCO-sympathetic people and maybe SCO employees. It’s typical. They also attack Pamela Jones, sometimes under these articles from SJVN.

Finance

Last week’s analyses of Novell’s results [1, 2, 3] can maybe be complemented by newer financial news. It is without a doubt that Novell fell after the results disappointed in places (revenue down more sharply than anticipated). On one day, the following day to be precise, Novell’s shares were down 7.5%.

Shares of Novell Inc. (NOVL – Snapshot Report) slipped almost 7.5% today, despite reporting second-quarter earnings per share yesterday that topped Wall Street expectations.

The Boston press, which resides near Novell’s main headquarters, wrote about this decline too.

Shares of Novell Inc. slipped after the Waltham company reported mixed results for its fiscal second quarter. The open-source software maker said posted a profit that topped analysts estimates but sales fell nearly 9 percent.

More analysis of Novell’s sharp revenue drop:

However, management feels confident that this segment will become profitable over the next 18 months, and this commitment should be easier to monitor once the firm begins publishing operating expenses ant the business unit level in the first quarter of 2010. Our long-term expectations remain subdued for Novell as revenue continues to shift away from profitable legacy systems toward lower-margin open source solutions.

Apart from fairly repetitive or negligible reporting, there were also some more positive reports which looked only at income. See for example:

i. Novell Q2 net income surges to $16m

Novell has reported a net income of $16m, or $0.05 per share for the second quarter ended April 30, 2009, compared to a net income of $6m, or $0.02 per share for the same period last year.

ii. Dell, J Crew Rise; Tiffany, Marvell Fall

Novell, Inc (NOVL) rose 4.0% or 18 cents to $4.61 after the networking software and technology services developer said second quarter revenues fell 9% to $215.6 million from $235.7 million a year ago. Net income in the quarter rose 164% to $15.6 million or 5 cents per diluted share compared to net income of $5.9 million or 2 cents per a year ago.

iii. Daily Digest 29 May

Software firm Novell has posted second-quarter revenue of USD216 million, down from USD236 million in the same period last year. Net income, however, came in at USD16 million for the period — almost triple the USD6 million reported in 2008. Linux product sales were the star performer, recording a 25 percent year-on-year increase to USD37 million. Revenue in the firm’s identity, access and compliance management software segment climbed 2 percent to USD28 million. “Our Linux and identity businesses have the greatest potential to continue to expand operating margins, and we plan to attain profitability within these businesses no later than 12-18 months from today, barring unforeseen circumstances,” said Novell chief executive Ron Hovsepian.

Netware

Moving on to some products and starting with the older ones, here we have the pro-Microsoft press speaking about NetWare.

Contrast that with Novell (Nasdaq: NOVL). At one time, NetWare was a pervasive operating system for Windows networks. But developers never really loved it. They didn’t play with or extend it. Instead, system administrators were certified to maintain it.

That’s an exercise in revisionism. NetWare suffered a demise for other important reasons.

A little more background about what Microsoft did to Novell comes from CRN.

He says the SI business provided software for a vertical market and, at the time, everything was based on Novell Netware, and Windows 95 had only just been released. Crane was also using products like Quattro Pro and Paradox to help customers achieve their needs.

Once he started to realise what Microsoft was offering with Windows 95, Office and NT Crane could see the writing was on the wall for Novell.

Virtualisation

Cassatt has been acquired by CA, a Microsoft ally where crime was running rampant. Here is a report about it which happens to mention Novell as a virtualisation contender.

Coleman’s vision was a precursor of the current trends in cloud computing and data center convergence, which are becoming key areas of competition for such top-tier companies as IBM, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems, Novell and VMware.

This mixed report seems almost like plagiarism.

Current trends in cloud computing and data centre convergence are becoming key areas of competition for such top-tier companies as IBM, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems, Novell and VMware.

Notice how both articles, which were separately published around the same time, contain the phrase “becoming key areas of competition for such top-tier companies as IBM, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems, Novell and VMware.” This can’t be a coincidence. ITWeb cites eWeek however.

Mail

There is a tool for abandoning Novell GroupWise and moving to Microsoft instead. Here is a new press release about it.

Adding another feather to the cap of Nucleus Data Recovery.Com Pvt. Ltd is the launch of advanced version of Kernel for Novell GroupWise to Exchange 9.05.01, an efficient tool to migrate from Novell GroupWise Server environment to MS Exchange Server environment. With fast, secure, accurate and reliable conversion results, single and multiple user mailboxes are migrated successfully to MS Outlook PST file or MS Exchange Server user mailboxes.

GroupWise was listed as a supported technology in some other articles such as:

i. Verizon Getting BlackBerry Pearl Flip

The handset is still a BlackBerry, which means it will fit in well in a corporate environment for push e-mail services. Verizon’s Pearl Flip will provide over-the-air syncing that works with Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus, Novell GroupWise, and a host of other Web-based e-mail providers like Gmail and Yahoo Mail. Like the BlackBerry Pearl, the Flip has a SureType keyboard for composing messages.

ii. BlackBerry Bold or iPhone 3G: Which fits your corporate attire?

It is important to note that BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) supports Novell GroupWise and Lotus Notes, while both of those servers support the iPhone only through Web clients, limiting their integration with other iPhone apps such as Contacts and Calendar. Thus, BlackBerry supports more e-mail systems, even though you have to add a dedicated server to get that support.

iii. Disadvantages of In-House Email Solutions

In short, in-house email is having physical on-site emails which means that your business sets up and manages your own email servers. An email server is a computer within a network that basically works as your virtual post office. Popular and most used email servers are Microsoft Exchange Server, Novell GroupWise and IBM Lotus Domino.

We wrote about OpenChange just a few days ago and also back in February. The relation to Novell (and Fedora) is now mentioned in ZDNet Asia.

Right now, Novell’s Evolution client and the KMail and Mailody applications include libmapi libraries, according to the OpenChange project.

Identity Management

Novell wants to grow in this area of managing identities, but it mostly makes an appearance in Microsoft’s shadow these days. Here is one such example from the news.

Paoli and Craig Shank, general manager of interoperability strategy at Microsoft, emphasized various interoperability efforts at Microsoft ranging from document format work and collaborating on standards bodies to working with Novell on enabling Microsoft’s Silverlight rich media technology to run on Linux. The company also has assisted in such efforts as development of a PHP software development kit for Azure.

More about Microsoft and Novell in online identity:

Microsoft has already built a selector program, called CardSpace, into its Vista operating system. Stand-alone selectors are available from two other companies, Novell and Azigo. Google, Oracle and PayPal have joined the industry foundation and there are a few working sample cards available, but no major retailer or financial institution has implemented the system yet.

Novell’s inclusion of AD support in SLED 11 is not news anymore, but some writers still find it worthy of being reported.

Looking for a good way to integrate your company’s Linux desktops with Microsoft Active Directory? Novell just might offer the easiest solution — but it certainly isn’t the only game in town.

Last March, Novell rolled out new versions of its SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) and Server (SLES) products. Both offer a number of interesting new features, and SLED 11 is an especially attractive option for business users. Among other advantages, SLED combines solid driver support (including both ATI and Nvidia graphics cards), a well-rounded set of desktop software packages, and an elegant user interface designed to keep both Mac and Windows users happy.

Security

Novell is mentioned briefly in this page about cybersecurity

Novell Inc. (NasdaqGS:NOVL) delivers the best engineered, most interoperable Linux* platform and a portfolio of integrated IT management software that helps customers around the world reduce cost, complexity and risk. With our infrastructure software and ecosystem of partnerships, Novell harmoniously integrates mixed IT environments, allowing people and technology to work as one.

Novell’s PR people wrote a few words about the US Cyber Czar, hoping to grab some attention for themselves (and their products).

People

A former Novell/UNIX developer is now somewhat involved with JavaFX, but there is nothing too exciting to say about the coverage.

Kim Topley: I work as a Java consultant in the UK. For most of the last 12 years, I have been developing Swing applications for investment banks in London. Prior to that, I worked on the UNIX operating system kernel for the computer manufacturer ICL (now part of Fujitsu) and for Novell, who owned UNIX at the time that I worked for them.

Marketing

Another Novell advertisement for Teaming + Conferencing has been uploaded.

Yet another old Novell advert was uploaded to YouTube (again). That does not count as much activity however. Novell presence in the news has been exceptionally boring this year. There is no substantial progress; like many other companies, Novell is in “brace” mode. █

Summary: Last roundup of Novell news for this week, excluding SUSE

Shreepriya Gopalan claims to be the owner of Novell, but that’s just a bizarre little story which is not worth discussing. Let’s start with UNIX ownership (SCO trial).

Novell vs. SCO

Groklaw has covered the very little that there was in this trial, starting with the latest exchange of paper blows.

Here’s SCO’s appeal brief and this is Novell’s brief that this one is replying to. While I will read it carefully now, the opening six pages, to my quick reading, reflect SCO’s usual casual nod in the direction of accuracy. For example, how do you like this sentence:

This is the rare case where the principals on both sides of the contract agree on the parties’ intent.

I think not, m’lord. That’s why you are in appeals court.

There is some more information here.

Novell has filed a response to Wayne Gray’s Motion asking if he can file an “amicus” brief.

Groklaw took another look back at the past. It attempted to resolve uncertainty around Novell’s UnixWare copyrights.

I’m going to present some new evidence that Novell did have copyrights prior to 1993, and that there was no NetWare that I can find in UnixWare until after 1993, but I will also republish an article Groklaw published on June 17, 2004, “Notice this Notice?”. Yes. Five years ago. It presents a clear timeline that will help to lift this fog.

Finance

There is this one report covering Novell, but financial news outlets have generally been very quiet since the market collapsed.

Virtualisation

Here comes that old thing again [1, 2]. It’s about rPath’s Web seminar, which had Novell involved.

Hosted by rPath and presented with Forrester Research, Novell and BlueLock, this webinar offers insights from industry experts on emerging approaches to automating “the last mile” of IT processes, specifically as it relates to system configuration, deployment and maintenance across traditional, virtual and cloud-based execution environments. The result is lower cost, lower risk application delivery, and dramatically improved enterprise agility and business responsiveness.

There are several reports about the looming death of Cassatt and here is one which mentions Novell.

Cassatt’s impending demise comes at a time when cloud computing and converged data centers are becoming important trends in the industry. Top-tier vendors—including IBM, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems, Novell and VMware—have unveiled strategies designed to integrate server, storage, networking and software into a single data center entity, fueled in large part by virtualization.

Novell’s PlateSpin Recon 3.6 is out, but the potential of PlateSpin does not appear to have been realised inside Novell. Lots of key staff left.

Novell today announced the availability of PlateSpin(R) Recon 3.6, the first data center workload profiling, analysis and planning tool to combine consolidation planning with virtual capacity management to give customers an ongoing view of their physical and virtual infrastructure ( http://www.novell.com/products/recon/manage_virtual.html ).

DMTF

Here is the big press release about this ‘cloud’ (server) computing initiative. Novell is a member too, so it was mentioned in some places that include:

i. DMTF Group to Create Cloud Computing Specs

The Distributed Management Task Force is organizing a group of members who will create informational specifications aimed at addressing the need for open management standards for cloud computing. The group—made up of officials with such vendors as AMD, Intel, Novell, Red Hat, Microsoft, IBM and HP—in particular will look at ways to develop standards that create interoperability between private and public clouds.

ii. Tech giants form open cloud standards group

Companies sitting on the OCSI leadership board include AMD, Cisco, Citrix, EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Novell, Red Hat, Savvis, Sun and VMware. Many of these companies were also signatories to a recent Open Cloud Manifesto, with Microsoft being the notable exception.

iii. DMTF to Develop Standards for Managing a Cloud Computing Environment

The current incubator leadership board consists of AMD, Cisco, Citrix, EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Novell, Red Hat, Savvis, Sun Microsystems, and VMware. Please click here for more information, or to learn more about participating.

iv. DMTF creates open cloud incubator

Some, though not all, of those members signed the Open Could Manifesto in mid-March. Microsoft, along with Amazon.com, criticized the secret drafting of the manifesto and declined to sign the document.

It’s important to remember the unsubstantiated FUD Microsoft produced against the “Open Cloud Manifesto.”

Mail/Collaboration

Since Novell’s headquarters are based near Boston, the Boston press tends to mention it a lot and here is the latest example.

John Dragoon, chief marketing officer of Novell Inc., a Linux software maker in Waltham, said the company was already investing in high-definition teleconferencing gear, as a substitute for costly plane trips. But the swine flu outbreak has given Novell one more reason to rely more on video technology.

It’s very interesting that they describe Novell as a “Linux software maker” despite the fact that the overwhelming majority in the company does not work on Linux, not to mention the shrinking number of Novell engineers that develop Linux. Novell laid many of them off.

Here is some new coverage that mentioned GroupWise:

i. Alltel Grabs BlackBerry Pearl Flip

Like the BlackBerry Pearl, the Flip has a SureType keyboard for composing messages, and it can receive wireless push e-mail, calendar, and contact information from Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus, Novell GroupWise, and Web-based e-mail providers like Gmail and Yahoo Mail.

ii. Q&A: Turning The E-mail Explosion Into VAR Opportunity

Smolek: The primary purpose of an ECM solution is to manage electronic content. In that respect, e-mail is simply another form of electronic content for the solution to manage. ECM solutions providers have added connectors for the major e-mail server software, such as Microsoft Exchange and Novell GroupWise.

Identity Management

The Gartner Group is a bit of a joke, but nevertheless, it has just commented on Novell in identity management although the focus of this analysis is Sun/Oracle.

The Oracle/Sun deal shares some similarities with HP’s exit from the IAM market. Subsequently, Novell acquired most of HP’s IAM customers (see “Lessons From Novell and HP on Managing IAM Ownership Changes”). Oracle risks losing Sun customers if support is withdrawn too quickly.

Security

For an article about security, SD Times actually approached a marketing person from Novell, which is not a smart move. Maybe he was just the one chosen to deliver the message.

Novell has published a security development life cycle for its Linux-based products, said spokesperson Ian Bruce.

Bruce is still pretty new at Novell and he is not likely to be very familiar with the technical aspects of the subject he remarks on. Ryan Naraine at ZDNet has meanwhile commented on security vulnerabilities in Novell’s proprietary software.

5. Novell Teaming

A user-enumeration weakness and multiple cross-site scripting vulnerabilities expose users of Novell Teaming to a range of attack scenarios.

* A remote attacker can exploit the user-enumeration weakness to enumerate valid usernames and then perform brute-force attacks; other attacks are also possible.
* The attacker may leverage the cross-site scripting issues to execute arbitrary script code in the browser of an unsuspecting user in the context of the affected site. This may allow the attacker to steal cookie-based authentication credentials and to launch other attacks.

NDS is mentioned in this introduction to mobile computing protection (particular offers thereof).

The enterprise edition offers centralized management and supports numerous directory services such as Microsoft’s Active Directory, OpenLDAP, and Novell Directory Services for user and machine management.

People

It was useful to discover that Diebold’s board members include someone from Novell.

    --  Richard L. Crandall, non-executive chairman of the board, Novell, Inc.,
        Waltham, Mass.

Another former Noveller makes her move.

Averett received a bachelor’s degree from Brigham Young University and master’s from Adams State College in Alamosa, Colo. She has worked in human resources for Community Nursing Services in Salt Lake City, WordPerfect Corp. in Orem, Novell Inc. in Provo, Nu Skin Enterprises Inc. in Provo, and Intermountain Healthcare in Park City.

Matt Asay’s connections with Novell are being revealed once again.

Matt’s session, entitled “Set Your Content Free: Why Your Content Strategy Needs to Start with Open Source,” will offer insight into the current economic and technical drivers of open source adoption. An open source advocate since 1998, Matt is one of the industry’s leading open source business strategists. He is a founding member of Novell’s Linux Business Office and founded and runs the annual Open Source Business Conference.

Despite all that, he occasionally criticises Novell, but there is a conflict of interests in his writings, obviously.

Amanda from the Linux Foundation appears to have interviewed Markus Rex (of Novell) for the Collaboration Summit. He used to be their CTO and this interview was made private for some reason (a previous one with Novell's James Bottomley was not) [update: it’s now public]

Partners

Novell was mentioned in many press releases of other companies, but there was nothing of great significance. Here is something about a BVI Networks-Novell connection:

BVI Networks is led by an experienced management team consisting of former senior managers from Cisco, Oracle, Motorola, IBM, Juniper, Novell and Intel, as well as retail professionals with extensive background in operations, merchandising, asset protection and consumer packaged goods.

Autonomy still puts Novell in the footer(ish) of its press releases and Novell was also just mentioned in:

1. APTARE and Hitachi Data Systems Renew Global Partnership-APTARE Delivers Web 2.0 Storage Reporting and Management Functionality to Hitachi Storage Capacity Reporter
2. Growing Number of Academic Institutions Choose Elluminate Solutions Despite Economic Downturn
3. Neocleus Ships NeoSphere Next Generation Client Virtualization Solution

Marketing

The following weird video was uploaded to YouTube (twice even). It’s promotional.

Here is another new upload.

That’s about it for this week. █

Summary: The remainder of Novell’s news from this week

THIS IS the weekly post which deals with news about Novell’s proprietary software. We shall begin with SCO.

SCO/UNIX

The only Web site to have covered the developments in SCO vs Novell is Groklaw. It published the following 3 posts:

i. SCO’s mobile hopes

Does that sound like they know what the different mobile products are? Maybe they know, but it’s not so clear to me. Is Me Inc now FCmobilelife? Or is Me Inc Mobile something entirely different? I thought SCO said Me Inc was a victim of the economy, but I don’t know what that means for FCmobilelife. Is it flourishing? How would we know? Can anyone find a clue in the latest 10K, linked to above?

ii. SCO Motion for More Exclusivity Denied, the March MORs, and A Proposed Amicus in the Novell Appeal

In the appeal of SCO v. Novell, there are some events to note as well. There is a request to file an amicus brief by Wayne Gray. Yes, that Wayne Gray. The iNUX trademark guy. To help you contextualize, the Middle District of Florida’s Tampa Division recently granted motions on summary judgment brought by X/Open and Novell in the Gray v. Novell et al iNUX/UNIX trademark litigation, tossing out all 11 claims in Gray’s complaint.

iii. Clerk Signs Off on Novell’s Costs In the Amount of $99,639.09

The Chief Deputy Clerk has signed off on Novell’s bill of costs, payable by SCO, in the amount of $99,639.09:

Will Novell ever see a nickel? Novell owns UNIX and memories of Lotus return in this writing about Sun getting acquired (along with its UNIX assets that may be sensitive to Novell’s wrath).

It’s probably a little early to be looking for implications of Oracle buying Sun (no, it’s official, here’s the press release). They’ve only just confirmed it’s happening, and as one of the journalists who covered Novell buying Lotus many years ago I can confirm things aren’t done until they’re done, frankly.

Going back to legacy, Novell is also mentioned as a (distant) past guest in “Let’s Talk Computers.” This time it’s about Microsoft.

Virtualisation

The ‘Microsoft press’ has published an article where it mentions Novell. Repeating what we saw last week (mentioned previously in a similar context), Forrester Research, Novell and BlueLock are appearing together in a webinar about virtualisation.

From the Microsoft news platform, which treats everything but the Microsoft-controlled offers as secondary:

Balkansky skillfully danced around the question, saying that customers will want VMware’s overall features and the maturity of its products more than they want XenServer or Hyper-V. He may be right — VMware has the name and reputation, both well-deserved. But Citrix and Microsoft (along with Virtual Iron, Red Hat, Novell, IBM and so on) are building reputations in the business, too. And they’re attacking VMware hard on price. Will the attacks take their toll? That’s a great unknown now. In general, I like the fact that VMware is more seriously recognizing the lower end of the market, and targeting it with affordable options.

About the upcoming webinar:

Also, on Thursday, April 30th, rPath is hosting “Tackling the Last Mile of IT Process Automation,” a webinar presented with Forrester Research, Novell and BlueLock. Attendees will hear from industry experts on emerging approaches to automating “the last mile” of IT processes.

Also:

The webinar, sponsored by rPath, will focus on strategies for automating application deployment and maintenance across traditional, virtual and cloud environments. Experts from rPath, Forrester Research, Novell and BlueLock will provide a framework for understanding how the cloud works as the host for application deployment.

Mail

Novell is trying to gain GroupWise users at Microsoft’s expense. There is a new migration route.

Novell yesterday announced a new promotion designed to help organizations move to Novell GroupWise 8 at a significantly reduced cost. Organizations currently using a competitor’s messaging platform can now exchange each existing competitor license for a free GroupWise 8 license. Customer who take advantage of this offer for their integrated collaboration environment will only be required to commit to one year of maintenance support for each user seat.

Here is the press release.

GWAVA, Novell’s largest collaboration partner, in conjunction with other software vendors, announced today a worldwide event series that addresses the high cost of deploying complex collaboration solutions like Microsoft Exchange with Sharepoint or IBM Lotus Notes. This seminar series, developed for CTOs and Information Technology managers, also applies to organizations dependent on legacy software such as Tobit David, Sun One (formerly iPlanet) and other aging collaboration solutions. It focuses on the total cost of ownership on these platforms vs. migrating to GroupWise on Linux.

In a separate press release from Mirapoint, Novell’s GroupWise was mentioned along many other possibilities for mail/groupware.

With the newly updated RazorSafe appliances, Mirapoint’s customers may now choose from even more powerful solutions for meeting compliance regulations affecting businesses of all sizes. Its expanded RazorSafe 200, 400, and 6000 product line adds seamless integration with email clients including Microsoft Outlook, Lotus Notes, Novell GroupWise on top of existing web access, and supports all major email servers, including Microsoft Exchange, Novell GroupWise, Lotus Domino, and Mirapoint Message Server.

Identity/Management

Sentinel was in the headlines this week. It started with this press release about SAP certification.

Novell today announced that its Novell® Sentinel™ 6.1 security information event management (SIEM) product has achieved SAP-certified integration with the SAP NetWeaver® technology platform. For customers, the integration significantly reduces risk and cuts the costs of managing security because IT administrators can respond to critical situations as they occur.

This was also published lazily in CIOL under a different headline :

Novell has announced that its Novell Sentinel 6.1 security information event management (SIEM) product has achieved SAP-certified integration with the SAP NetWeaver technology platform.

See how the words change very subtly (compare with the original press release). It's junk. It's not journalism.

The bigger news for Sentinel was this about the Navy choosing it.

Novell announced that the U.S. Navy Cyber Defense Operations Command (NCDOC) has selected Novell(R) Sentinel(TM) to automate and centralize security monitoring across hundreds of diverse locations worldwide. With more than 700,000 users worldwide, NCDOC is one of several military cyber defense teams in the Department of Defense (DOD) and is responsible for around-the-clock protection of the Navy’s computer networks.

A lot of coverage soon appeared, including:

i. Can you cut information security in hard times and survive

Based on Novell’s Sentinel event management software, Prometheus keeps watch on the Navy’s global network, used by more than 700,000 sailors and support staff. On a typical day, it handles anywhere between a few hundred thousand to several million alerts, leaving the 180 staff members charged with monitoring the network to deal with the real problems.

ii. Novell Sentinel To Interoperate With SAP NetWeaver

Novell Sentinel ties identities, systems and data together to deliver a centralised view of business operations through an automated process that can stop violations before they happen.

iii. Navy awards deal for cybersecurity support

The U.S. Navy has contracted Novell to support cybersecurity initiatives to help counter threats to naval computer networks.

Massachusetts-based Novell was awarded the contract from the Navy Cyber Defense Operations Command. According to a news release, Novell will supply its Sentinel technologies to “automate and centralize security monitoring across hundreds of diverse locations worldwide.”

iv. Novell to secure US Navy networks

The platform integrates identity data with security event management, which facilitates the efficient monitoring of resources across geographically dispersed networks.

Here is some more coverage about ID management. It mentions Novell.

The two are listed among the Top 5 identity management vendors as judged by consulting firm Burton Group. IBM, CA and Novell are the other three.

There is a similar story about Oracle’s impact on identity management now that it inherits Sun’s portfolio.

Jonathan Penn, vice president with Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc., said that excluding strong authentication, which neither company has, the combined organization will have as much as 25% of the identity management software market, giving it No. 1 status, outpacing competitors such as IBM, CA Inc., Novell Inc. and Microsoft.

[...]

To that end, Penn said IBM, CA, Novell and Microsoft to a lesser extent will undoubtedly be poised to exploit opportunities among Sun’s identity management customer base, sowing fear and uncertainty to try to poach customers.

On Information Card Foundation (ICF) from RSA:

Information Cards bring a familiar offline paradigm—the cards you carry in your wallet—to the online world. They work with a new software tool called a selector that operates as an extension to your Web browser. Selectors are available today from ICF members Azigo, Microsoft, and Novell, as well as from several open source projects.

ICF and Novell were mentioned in finextra.com as well, just a few days ago.

The Equifax I-Card is among the first commercial I-card-based products to launch from members of ICF, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to developing a simpler and more secure digital identity on the Internet. Led by Deutsche Telecom, Equifax, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle PayPal and Parity, the ICF promotes the rapid build-out and adoption of Internet-enabled digital identities using information cards.

Storage

There is almost nothing here except for this:

Two days before, on April 14, Sun Microsystems rolled out its Open Network Systems plan, which also incorporates Intel’s Xeon 5500 chips—also known as Nehalem EP—as well as Sun’s own Solaris operating system, networking and storage technologies and integrated Flash memory capabilities.

Other vendors—from heavyweights such as IBM and Dell to Novell to newcomers such as Schooner Information Technology—also are moving in that direction.

Security

Speculations that Novell would buy McAfee may be far behind us, but those two companies have just announced a partnership:

Novell and McAfee, Inc. Announce Partnership to Deliver Stronger Security Policy Enforcement, Deeper Visibility into End-User Activity and Compliance Assurance for Enterprise Customer

[...]

At the RSA Conference 2009, Novell and McAfee, Inc. (NYSE: MFE) today announced a partnership that will enhance McAfee® ePolicy Orchestrator® (ePO™) with a holistic view of both network events and users. This combined approach will accelerate and pinpoint response to potential threats and provide administrators the much-needed ability to automatically enforce security and identity access-related policies, making it easy to prove compliance and ensure trusted access.

There is plenty of coverage, e.g.:

i. McAfee, Inc. Expands Security Innovation Alliance, Adds Systems Integrator Partner Category

There are eight new members that have joined the program as Associate Partners, including Authenex, Cryptotech, eIQnetworks, Novell, S21sec, Solidcore, Triumfant and Telos. Across North America and Europe, McAfee now has more than 55 SIA partners committed to helping customers drive operational savings with McAfee Compatible products.

ii. Novell and McAfee Tie Up to Enhance Interoperability

Novell and McAfee announced a strategic partnership that gives McAfee’s ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO) solution users a holistic view of both network events and users. This combined approach reportedly allows real-time response to potential threats and provides administrators the much-needed ability to automatically enforce security and identity access-related policies, making it easy to prove compliance and ensure trusted access.

iii. Novell and McAfee Form Enterprise Security Alliance

Novell and McAfee have formed an alliance that will enable McAfee’s ePolicy Orchestrator, ePO, enterprise security product customers to use Novell’s Sentinel software to monitor and remediate network activity in real time to manage and mitigate business risk.

iv. McAfee, Novell Get Into Strategic Partnership

McAfee and Novell recently announced a strategic partnership, which would give McAfee’s ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO) solution users a holistic view of both network events and users.

v. Novell Partners With McAfee

McAfee ePO customers can use Novell Sentinel to create an ‘identity aware’ environment to better manage and mitigate business risk.

vi. EMC, Symantec kick-off security barrage at RSA (also in here and here)

While McAfee isn’t trotting out new products at the conference, the security firm did have news related to its Security Innovation Alliance program, in which third-party vendors participate to integrate McAfee technologies, particularly the APIs for its ePolicy Orchestrator management console. The SIA program, now at 55 partners, this week officially added Authenex, Cryptotech, eIQnetworks, Novell, S21sec, Solidcore, Trimfant, and Telos, the firm said today.

People

Eric Schmidt, who used to run Novell, will be coming to Utah later this year.

The Utah Technology Council (UTC) is thrilled to announce Eric Schmidt, Chairman of the Board and CEO of Google Inc., as the keynote speaker for its 11th annual Hall of Fame black-tie gala this year. The 2009 Hall of Fame will be held on Friday, October 23, 2009, at the Grand Ballroom of the Grand America Hotel, Salt Lake City.

Move Networks has just bought Inuk Networks and there is an element of Novell in there.

Move Networks says, he led the company to eight consecutive years of revenue growth and profitability, growing annual revenues from $3 million to $229 million. His resume also includes executive positions at Vinca, Novell and WordPerfect.

Messaging Architects gains some Novell DNA as well.

Previously, Mr. Riediger was a Technology Sales Specialist and a Product Sales Specialist at Novell, with a focus on Collaboration. Additionally, he worked in Business Development for the Novell Teaming+Conferencing solution in the German-speaking area. Prior to joining Messaging Architects, Mr. Riediger worked for i365, a Seagate company specializing in data backup, electronic discovery, disaster recovery, and regulatory compliance, with responsibility for direct sales.

Partners

Novell is mentioned very briefly as a partner in the following new press releases:

• HOB Debuts New VDI Solution for Remote Access to Virtual Desktops
• SAP Focuses on Green IT at Annual Virtualization Week Event
• Elluminate Expands Product Line With Next-Generation Video Collaboration Solution

Here is a company that is teaching Novell skills, not just Microsoft which seems to be its focus. It’s about Firebrand Training.

Autonomy keeps putting Novell in its background information which it appends to press releases, the latest examples being:

• MediaBin now Joins Autonomy Virage Family of Products to Deliver Complete Rich Media Management Solutions Suite
• Autonomy Wins the United Kingdom’s Prestigious Queen’s Awards for Enterprise
• Autonomy Corporation plc Announces Results for the First Quarter Ended March 31, 2009

Marketing

Little was added to YouTube in the past week, but here is Novell’s stand at Linux Expo 2009.

There’s also this about site design.

That’s about it for now. █

Novell today announced an integrated vision for the future of the data center and a portfolio of integrated products designed to help customers increase agility while reducing cost, complexity and risk. The Service-Driven Data Center provides solutions to build, manage and measure the next generation data center so IT executives can deliver the business services that end users need through a flexible, automated and cost-effective infrastructure. Only Novell has the unique combination of technology-agnostic, interoperable and easy-to-use solutions that let customers maximize the utilization of their IT assets within a secure and compliant framework whether customers are running a server farm, building an internal cloud, or using an external cloud.

There was no coverage about this in the media, just copies of the press release, e.g. here and here.

Looking elsewhere, we found that the SCO trial moves forward (or almost nowhere).

SCO

SCO does not want to pay Novell and Novell formally replies to this objection.

Novell has responded [PDF] to SCO’s Objections to Novell’s Bill of Costs, submitted as the prevailing party in SCO v. Novell.

[...]

SCO *didn’t* contest, Novell points out, most of the bill of costs, and it didn’t contest that each of the depositions for which Novell seeks to recover costs were “reasonably necessary to the litigation of the case”, which is the standard.

Here is another subsequent motion from Novell:

Novell has filed its brief in the appeal of SCO v. Novell. It’s 87 pages, so I haven’t read it yet myself. I’ll swing back by after I read it. But the quick look at the index and the closing words indicates Novell is asking the court to affirm the lower court: “For all the above reasons, the district court judgment should be affirmed.” That’s on page 67 of the filing, which is page 81 of the PDF. Keep that disparity in mind when you look up page numbers in the opening index. For example, the Summary of Argument is page 21 of the filing, but you’ll find it on page 35 of the PDF.

Pamela Jones meanwhile unearths some old information about SCO/Caldera.

The 2.4 kernel is exactly what the SCO litigation was supposedly about. We’re talking the GPL here, though, so I can’t help but ask another natural question. Did SCO carefully provide the source for all the Linux code it distributed, including with Open UNIX 8 (and later Unixware with the LKP)?

There is another article of this type.

ZENWorks/Past Technologies

Novell is still making some changes to ZENworks Configuration Management.

Novell on April 6 announced several enhancements to its solution suite for endpoint management designed to help customers maximize their investments in the ZENworks product line.

Virtualisation

The Var Guy, blinded by his support of Novell, fails to see that Novell’s investment in PlateSpin turned out rather badly.

As The VAR Guy watched the PlateSpin demonstrations, Novell’s strategy finally became clear. First, get customers addicted to PlateSpin as a key tool for server consolidation and virtualization efforts that cut data center costs. Second, make sure SUSE Linux is a potential destination platform for the consolidation projects.

Novell’s Business Service Management strategy, in stark contrast, seems to be a work in progress. Yes, BSM helps Novell customers to further improve system up-time. But Novell’s efforts to cross-train SUSE Linux partners on Business Service Management are just starting.

See the comments.

Mail/GroupWise

Another week, another mention of BlackBerry support for GroupWise:

BlackBerry Enterprise Server is designed for organisations that manage their own email servers. The BlackBerry Enterprise Server software tightly integrates with IBM® Lotus® Domino®, Microsoft® Exchange and Novell® GroupWise® and offers advanced security features and IT policy controls to enable secure, push-based wireless access to email and other corporate data.

Novell’s GroupWise might play nice with the Palm Pre thanks to this product.

“We look forward to Palm announcing a Synergy SDK to allow CompanionLink to synchronize Outlook, Lotus Notes, ACT! by Sage, Outlook Business Contact Manager, and Novell GroupWise data directly to the Palm Pre. Until that time, our currently available products will support the early adopters of the Palm Pre…”

There are many people in government who still rely on GroupWise.

One of Google’s biggest global GMail deals was a $10million project with Telstra and SMS Technology to supply the NSW Education Department with 1.5 million accounts.

[...]

Late last year staff continued to use the Novell GroupWise platform for email.

Here is another big client of GroupWise.

The company has an extensive communications network connecting thousands of professionals with clients and partners. It uses Novell’s Groupwise collaboration suite, and has extremely high mail volumes: in the construction side of the business alone over 50 000 e-mails are exchanged every day.

[...]

The Aveng implementation involved integrating Mimecast with the Novell NetWare environment. Mimecast’s core infrastructure is based on its own carrier-class technology platform, which in turn is based on open industry standards and with powerful Web-based interfaces. Users see no change to how they access e-mail as messages are passed from the Mimecast servers (which do scanning and archival) to Aveng’s GroupWise servers and then on to the clients. Users access the mail archives through the Web console, which provides virtually instant response times on searches.

Will Novell lose even more GroupWise users because of Microsoft?

Fitzpatrick said Microsoft has pushed DAS as his company looks to migrate to Exchange from Novell GroupWise email, but he’s holding back. “I don’t want to have the hassle with it,” he said. “I’m also investigating hosted Exchange for that reason.”

This report also shows up right here under a different headline.

Management

IDG mentioned Novell’s Managed Objects in this article about BSM.

While the company is credited for coining the term BSM, BMC is not alone in the market. Companies such as Novell (which acquired Managed Objects), ManageEngine and Zyrion also develop BSM software applications.

Joe Panettieri (“Var Guy”) mentioned Novell in a similar context.

Generall speaking, I don’t hear much about Novell in the MSP market. But I think BSM software could emerge as a niche solution for larger MSPs that need to manage SLAs.

The following article which covers identity management sought a comment from Novell.

Jay Roxe, director of product marketing at Novell (www.novell.com), agrees that tough times are increasing the likelihood of internal and external threats and suggests using identity management as a possible solution with ROI potential.

“Identity management is an area where IT security pros can demonstrate return on investment while also addressing major security concerns,” says Roxe, who adds that layoffs can be especially problematic. “Having automatic systems in place that can immediately deactivate an employee’s access to valuable information on a company’s systems is important.”

Roxe also recommends consolidating duplicate, often obsolete systems to save operational costs and streamline management processes. He also advises assessing employee role profiles and ensuring that no one individual has too much access. He cites an example of a single employee who can issue purchase orders and approve payments as a potential fraud risk. In these cases, compliance management systems can automatically enforce IT policies that manual processes would have difficulty tracking.

Support

A YouTube account called NovellServices has just uploaded this technical video.

People

David Bradford was mentioned in a lot of places because his company received funding, which is becoming a rare occasion in this economy. As the press release states (also here), Bradford has roots in Novell:

In preparation for Series B funding, industry veteran and respected executive David Bradford has taken the helm. Mr. Bradford brings 30 years of experience to Fusion-io, including 15 years at the networking software giant Novell, Inc. As a senior Novell executive, he helped lead the company from startup status through a series of acquisitions, public offerings and global business development activities to its position as a multi-billion dollar corporation. During his last three years at Novell, he reported directly to the CEO, Eric Schmidt.

“I am delighted to hear that David Bradford has been appointed CEO of Fusion-io,” said Dr. Schmidt, now the CEO of Google. “I have great confidence in his ability to lead this innovative company.”

This was covered in:

i. Wozniak’s Utah startup lands $47.5M, CEO

The three-year-old Salt Lake City company said Tuesday that it has raised $47.5 million in funding and named former Novell executive David Bradford as CEO.

ii. Fusion-io closes $47.5 Mln Series B Funding round; names David Bradford CEO – Update

Regarding Bradford, the company said he brings 30 years of experience to Fusion-io, including 15 years at the networking software giant Novell, Inc.

iii. Fusion-io lands more funding; Names CEO

Enterprise storage company Fusion-io said Tuesday that it has raised $47.5 million in venture capital and named David Bradford, a former Novell executive, as CEO.

[...]

As for the new CEO, Fusion-io moved to add a CEO as it prepped for its latest round of financing. For the last decade, Bradford served on the board of directors of Pervasive Software. Prior to that, Bradford worked as senior vice president and general counsel at Novell for 15 years.

iv. Fusion-io Gets $47.5 Million In Venture Capital

New CEO Bradford is a 30-year veteran of the tech industry, including 15 years at networking company Novell, Fusion-io said. As a senior executive, he led Novell from startup status through a series of acquisitions, public offerings, and global business development. During his last three years at Novell, Bradford reported directly to chief executive Eric Schmidt, who is now CEO of Google.

v. Fusion-io gets funding infusion

In a tribute to Bradford’s networking skills and contact book he’s tapped Google CEO Eric Schmidt, a previous boss at Novell, where he worked for 15 years, to provide a supportive quote: “I am delighted to hear that David Bradford has been appointed CEO of Fusion-io. I have great confidence in his ability to lead this innovative company.”

vi. Fusion-io plans SSD-based ioSAN network drive

The expansion into network storage takes place just as Fusion-io has signed on former Novell executive David Bradford as its CEO. Besides his experience in networking software, Bradford was also instrumental in bringing Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak into the company as a chief scientist to help guide the storage producer’s research.

vii. Fusion-io Raises Huge, $47.5M Round

The firm said that it has named a new CEO, David Bradford, as part of the funding. Bradford joins from Novell, where he has spend the last 15 years.

viii. Fusion-io Lands A Big Round Of VC Funding

I just received a press release saying that Fusion-io has just landed a big Series B round of funding: $47.5 million from LightSpeed Venture Partners, and that it named David Bradford, a former senior VP and general counsel at Novell as its new CEO. Dell, New Enterprise Ventures and Sumitomo Ventures also participated in the investment.

ix. Fusion-io lands $47 million to develop flash storage

Fusion-io’s new CEO, Bradford, was the senior vice president and general counsel at Novell from 1985 to 2000, and has held a number of posts over the past decade in the legal world and at several Web 2.0 and social networking companies. Bradford currently serves on the board of directors for Pervasive Software, a database management vendor.

x. Wozniak’s storage startup Fusion-io raises $47.5M more

The company’s announcement notes that in Bradford’s last three years at Novell, he reported directly to then-chief executive Eric Schmidt (now CEO of Google). Not that Salt Lake City-based Fusion-io really needs to play a “six degrees of separation” game to find connections to tech superstardom — Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak recently joined as chief scientist.

Joe Weisenthal wrote this article about Eric Schmidt (also in Fortune) and he mentions briefly the Novell era.

This growth has propelled Eric from his prior status as a little-known CEO of a technology also-ran (Novell) to one of the world’s most powerful and richest men. He is also now widely regarded as one of the world’s most talented chief executives.

Novell lost a couple of vice presidents to Xiocom and this is still mentioned occasionally in the press.

Wireless broadband solution company Xiocom Wireless has appointed Dell executive Steve Erdman as president. Erdman, who has 22 years of experience in technology sales, marketing and global business management, will oversee day-to-day operations and business and market development. He was most recently vice president of channels and alliances at infrastructure software provider Novell.

Utah

It turns out that Novell has invested in a Utah-based company called TriSano. We saw the announcement from the project back in August.

TriSano was developed by the Collaborative Software Initiative, a Portland-based company, with financial backing from Novell. It is open-source software, meaning it was free for the state to acquire and available for anyone to download and change as they see fit.

At Novell’s campus there will soon be a workshop for people who game search engines.

The workshop will be held in the Mountainview Conference Room at the Novell Campus, in Provo, Utah, on April 29, 2009, from 8:00-11:00 a.m. Attendees that register by April 17th will receive a free website analysis upon registration. For more information, including registration, please visit http://www.seo.com/registration.

Novell’s Utah campus was also mentioned in this article about local public transportation.

UTA discusses new Provo-Orem bus line

[...]

As currently planned, Utah Valley University will serve as the northernmost terminal and the Novell Campus as the southernmost, with Brigham Young University as a major stop in the middle.

That’s about all for this week. █