10.17.09
Novell News Summary – Part III: SCO, SAP, GroupWise Abandonment in LA
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’
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. █
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