Cambridge software company Akamai Technologies Inc. (Nasdaq: AKAM) has appointed former Novell exec Jim Ebzery to lead sales, services and marketing operations across the Americas.
Global education leader Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) today announced the appointment of John K. Dragoon to Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer. Dragoon is based in HMH’s corporate headquarters in Boston, reporting directly to Chief Executive Officer Linda K. Zecher.
ownCloud Inc. recently announced that former SUSE executive and ownCloud co-founder Holger Dyroff has joined the company as vice president, sales and marketing. ownCloud Inc. is responsible for the popular open source file sync and share project. Dyroff studied law and business administration at University Erlangen-Nuremberg.
This site is turning 6 years old in just over a couple of week. A lot of time was spent here covering Novell. We mostly ignore SUSE stories at this stage. It’s in a mortal state anyway and ending the Novell threat is a mission largely accomplished (Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, Red Hat and others do not pay Microsoft patent tax). █
Bartz recruited to attack Google, Elop installed to bury MeeGo and sue Android with patents, Hovsepian used to attack Red Hat
Yahoo! Blog from Sunnyvale, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license (caption added by us, with Ballmer’s words)
Summary: Bartz is out, but she was a temporary pawn all along
A couple of years ago Bartz [1, 2] and Ballmer posed for the cameras in the same way Elop and Ballmer did half a year ago and Hovsepian and Ballmer did in 2006. All those handshakes were the formal handover of car keys to Ballmer. Hovsepian was emitted from his chair a few months ago, Elop plans to leave next year (according to several sources), and Bartz has just been fired (after many former Microsoft executives had been installed inside Yahoo!). It is not as bad as it sounds. Their goal was accomplished as the companies they pretended to be CEOs of were put in the hands of Microsoft.
What does that teach us about deals with Microsoft? We have a special wiki page about it. Microsoft is very manipulative and this destroys good companies that once provided more choices to the market. Without choice, the monopoly or duopoly of Microsoft and Apple is under no pressure to actually innovate. They can also take away people’s technological rights, making antifeatures the ‘standard’. Techrights strives to expose this sheer anti-competitive abuse. █
Summary: Ron Hovsepian says there is a plan for BrainShare 2011, but judging by previous years, it could still be a dead duck (called off)
THE ANNUAL event that is all about GroupWise is not being advertised this year (at least not yet), despite the fact that GroupWise is mentioned in some new pages [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15] (although as a very secondary item, as even in news about Novell mail the impression is given that GroupWise no longer has any impact). Even if the GWAVA event vanishes with Novell’s sale (it is currently planned to take place in Torrance), the man who ruined Novell wants to assure clients that BrainShare is not dead yet and there is also a press release about it (BrainShare 2011 was mentioned here recently). A couple of years ago BrainShare was called off after it had been announced and bookings were made; so there is no guarantees that BrainShare 2011 will ever materialise. Besides, why should anyone attend given that AttachMSFT is likely to trash some of Novell’s products? BrainShare 2010 is likely to have been the last ever, but we shall see… █
Update: Richard Bliss sent us the following information by mail:
I attempted to leave a comment on your latest blog concerning Novell and GWAVACon but the site didn’t accept comments.
You state that there isn’t any information about GWAVACon 2011 and suggest that it will be cancelled. GWAVACon 2011 was held January 22-26 in Torrance California with a near record attendance.
GWAVACon Europe is already receiving registration for the first week in October during Oktoberfest. You should join us.
GWAVACon 2012 has already been announced for January in Torrance again.
Summary: Novell continues to fail financially while the Hovsepian family is hoarding tens of millions of dollars for a job poorly done (selling out to Microsoft)
And Novell Inc. CEO Ronald W. Hovsepian earned a $1.3 million performance award. The software company has lost money for three straight years. Novell declined to comment.
Novell Inc. reported that chief executive Ronald W. Hovsepian’s $3.4 million stock and options package was 10 percent below what he got in 2008. But that was only because Novell’s stock price was so much lower. The company gave Hovsepian 170,192 more shares in 2009, and 241,681 more stock options than it did in 2008. Novell’s stock price has since increased by two-thirds, making it possible that the 2009 package could be worth more than his 2008 one.
What has Hovsepian done that’s so commendable?
It is hard to forget how Hovsepian lays off many people whose combined wages make up his bonus [1, 2]. He helps shows where today’s capitalism has gone slightly over the edge (widening the gap between rich and poor) and his employees are hopefully paying attention to it. In general, many of the skilled employees have already left and gone to work somewhere more ethical. It’s no wonder that Novell suffers a brain drain and in New Zealand, for example, even managers are missing right now:
Novell aims to fill two key local roles – a country lead/partner executive and a commercial and government sales representative, by the end of October.
Novell has suffered somewhat of an exodus this year and last year. Given that Novell is bound to be sold soon, not many people will pursue employment there. Perhaps those massive bonuses Hovsepian receives are — as we suggested before — intended to just keep him from leaving (which would leave the company in complete disarray). █
Summary: A look at the 10-year anniversary IBM and Novell are celebrating; Novell is trying to poach Solaris users
It is hard to tell what Novell is negotiating behind the scenes right now, but bids to acquire the company sure prove distracting and new analyses of Novell as a publicly-traded company must take into account that this is probably Novell’s final year. Existing and former Novell employees such as this guy, Justin Steinman who is quoted in this article, or even Dale Olds might not have a future in Novell. Where might they go next? We’ll have to wait and find out. Novell’s CTO, for example, ended up in the W3C (as CEO). Who is Novell’s existing CTO? Has it found a replacement for Jeff Jaffe yet? Will it bother at all at this stage?
“The “OpenSUSE Boosters” will be brought in for reinforcement.”Getting back to server news, see the press release about Novell’s latest poaching programme (also here). This received some press coverage [1, 2] and lots of it is in the Indian press for some reason [1, 2]. They sometimes make it sound like Novell is helping rather than preying, but here is a better headline with lengthy article that does more than repeat portions of the press release. █
Summary: Now that Novell is a dead company walking it’s time to say something about the tens of millions of dollars Ron Hovsepian made for his failure and betrayal of his suppliers
LAST week we wrote about Novell’s results (more here), emphasising that Novell is on its route to being acquired almost for sure. Here are some more new articles that agree with it:
The news that Novell has thrown in the towel and is seeking as immediate a trade buy as it can suggests that ultimately there can only be one Linux game in town – and it wears a rouge cap, shall we say.
The Wall Street Times newspaper reported earlier this month that Novell is in talks with as many as 20 potential acquirers, most of which are private equity firms. In March 2010, Novell rejected a bid from Elliott Associates, saying it undervalued the company.
Novell has reported a $12m drop in net income for the second quarter of 2010 from the same period last year. Novell reported net revenue of $204m for the quarter, compared with net revenue of $216m for the second fiscal quarter of 2009.
Novell’s CEO Ron Hovsepian has not an impressive scorecard. He should watch that someone who offered Ballmer "the egg treatment" for this type of failure [1, 2]. Hovsepian has earned a lot of money for himself (in excessive bonuses he did not deserve), but he is leaving Novell in the dust having sold GNU/Linux down the river. We are seeing Novell’s last months now and employees are probably brushing up their resumes.
Here is belated coverage of what was possibly Novell’s latest and very last public event where it pitched ‘clouds’ rather than “open source” or “Linux”.
Novell came back to Europe for the first time in five years to hold its BrainShare conference in Amsterdam last week. Besides the launch of the long-awaited version 4 of its Identity Manager (IM4) product line, Novell also clarified its approach to cloud computing.
Move now lists its headquarters in Irvine, California, although it apparently still has operations in American Fork, Utah, where the firm has been based since its founding by Novell founder Drew Major.
What would he say about Novell today? Did Ron Hovsepian do his job well? the outcome suggests he didn’t. Hovsepian’s legacy is the destruction of Novell. █
It’s an important point, which is why our “Boycott Novell” action/campaign (one among several) lives on. We append the text of interest at the bottom. █
“Our partnership with Microsoft continues to expand.”
–Ron Hovsepian, Novell CEO
I’d like to thank you for coming – it’s an honor to be in the same room with you.I’m one of the hackers– of the technical nature, not thelaw nature –of the system administrator breed,and we don’t make code, we just make sure that the machines that runthefree codekeep running so that the coders can,you know,keep writing it.But, it’sfunny to me; in the technical world, people really like to demonize Microsoft, but it’s a lot ofyou know, “Who cares,their software has nothing to do with what I do,so they’re not really a part…”, but I always wondered,what would MicrosoftcalltheirLinux distribution?If they decided, you know,“Okay, we can’t beat them, let’s join them.”, and theycame out with “Microsoft Linux”, would that hurt?
[Eben Moglen:]
I haven’t seen my dear friend Ron Hovsepian for some weeks, so I’m going to get on his nerves by saying to you: They will call it “Novell”.
[Laughter]
Whatever they do, they will do a lot of work not to call it anything, because to be a distributor of GPL’d software – particularly of that GPL’d software – would have collateral legal consequences for Microsoft it doesn’t want. The real reason for all the patent threatening is in order to be able to use our features, in BSD licenced and other permissively licensed works, to gaudily decorate their own failing software for the next two product cycles, while at the same time getting paid for software they don’t make, through patent revenue requests, okay? The real goal is to get paid for software they don’t make, because software they do make is not selling at a very great advantage over the immensity of their costs.
I’m not going to spend a lot of time here, on camera, talking about Microsoft’s strategy and our strategy, this week of all weeks, but catch me somewhere out there and I’ll say something more about it.
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