The Supreme Court’s docket shows that Novell requested an extension of time to file its petition for a writ of certiorari in the SCO v. Novell case, and Judge Sonia Sotomayor has just granted that request. They now have until February 18th to file their petition. As you recall, the earlier deadline was this month. At this level, the case is titled “Novell, Inc., Applicant v. The SCO Group, Inc.”
Finance
Some more analyses of Novell (NOVL as a stock) continue to come [1, 2, 3] and here is another case of detailed reporting (technical, not financial):
*The report covers the following IT systems management vendors: BMC, CA, EMC, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Novell and Symantec.
Virtualisation
Memories of Netware come back not because of the new Novell Client but because the Burton-esque comparison rears its ugly head again. Comparisons between VMware and Netware [1, 2] were last mentioned and shown one week ago and here is another example:
VMware is not Novell
“What makes VMware different than, say, Novell, is that Novell kept competing in Microsoft’s space rather than innovating. It kept fighting in the same boundaries and markets, on Microsoft’s terms,” said Scott Lowe, a virtualization expert formerly at a large VMware partner. [Editor's note: As a matter of full disclosure: He recently took a position at VMware parent company EMC Corp.]
A little more about PlateSpin, which has gone nowhere since Novell acquired it:
VMware had a product in the space (and still does) and there was also some popular products provided by 3rd parties like Platespin (who had a nice exit to Novell for ~$200MM).
Security
SJVN mentioned SLES as a candidate for a weakness that wasn’t. java-1_5_0-ibm has just proven to be a bit of a pain (also here) and ZENWorks, a proprietary software product from Novell, suffers from an SQL injection vulnerability. In the coming month, eDirectory will be at the firing line because of Intevydis. See the following coverage:
Intevydis intends to publish advisories on zero-day vulnerabilities in products such as Zeus Web Server, MySQL, Lotus Domino and Informix and Novell eDirectory between 11 January and 1 February, security blogger Brian Krebs reports.
Security expert Brian Krebs revealed that Intevydis will post advisories on products from big name vendors such as IBM, Novell and Sun Microsystems, in protest at a ‘responsible disclosure’ policy which it regards as a waste of time.
Utilizing change and configuration management tools can boost the ability to back up data automatically, notes Grant Ho, senior solutions marketing manager for endpoint management at Novell (www.novell.com).
People
Novell’s former CEO Eric Schmidt was mentioned here and so was Ray Noorda:
This mystery speaker has had the honor to be consulted by such leaders as Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google; Robert Allen, NY Times best-selling author; Bob Frankerberg (in the past: Chairman at Kinzan, Chairman, CEO at Encanto Networks, Chairman/CEO at Novell, Vice President at Hewlett-Packard, Vice President at HP ); Ray Noorda (former CEO of Novell).
He has also held executive positions at Legato, Novell and WordPerfect Corporation. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in business administration, finance from Brigham Young University.
Prior to entering the search industry, Ms. Carter occupied executive-level marketing and business management positions in such technology and finance companies as Novell, State Street Corporation, Sitara Networks and CheckFree Corporation.
Sydney-based integrator, Accucom, has snapped up several ex-Synergy employees to build out its managed services capabilities.
[...]
It also owns an ISP business and partners with HP, Cisco, Microsoft and Novell.
The movement of Jim Tanner was mentioned here last week, but here it is again at TMCNet (which mostly modifies press releases and posts them under a week later):
Jim Tanner Joins Hosted Call Center Solutions Provider inContact as SVP of Product and Strategy
According to a press release, Tanner has a wealth of IT and telecommunications experience in both domestic and international markets, having previously worked in product and market strategy forUnisys ( News – Alert), Novell, Realm Business Solutions, and others.
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.
Novell’s Ken Muir gets to speak to this one Web site, but it’s not particularly fascinating. He talks about Pulse [1, 2], which is proprietary for all it seems so far.
Ken Muir is the Chief Technology and Strategy Officer of Novell’s WorkGroup Business Unit. He is responsibile for the overall technical vision and strategy for Novell’s collaboration products. We asked Muir about his group’s work with Novell Pulse and how it integrates with Google Wave.
Connections/Partners
Novell’s connections with other companies can be seen in the following very recent articles:
These are Zelig-ian perspectives. I’ve sat down face to face with the heads of Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Novell – sometimes cordially, sometimes in negotiation. I’ve been in arms length contact with just about everyone who’s who in the tech industry.
The York-based reseller set up a professional services division in September to drive the transformation, which Haddow said was necessary to satisfy the big software vendors such as Microsoft, Oracle and Novell.
[...]
Haddow said Trustmarque is also throwing more weight behind six “elite” vendor partners: Microsoft, Novell, Adobe, VMware, McAfee and Symantec.
GoAnywhere Director installs on a variety of platforms, including IBM System i, IBM System p (AIX), IBM System z (Mainframe), Windows, Novell SUSE, Linux, UNIX, HP-UX, Mac OS and Solaris platforms. Pricing starts at $3,995.
Express Data is looking to recruit seven staff across its business development and account manager teams.
The jobs on offer include three business development manager positions for its Novell, Cisco SMB and Cisco practices, along with a Symantec partner enablement specialist and two account manager roles. It is also on the hunt for an account co-ordinator.
Messaging Architects, the global experts in email risk management, today announced the release of M+Archive 2009.2, its policy-based enterprise-class email retention and eDiscovery solution. This major release extends M+Archive’s search capabilities with a robust new web-based tool for eDiscovery designed for maximum efficiency, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness and minimum risk during an electronic discovery process. Additionally, the new version of M+Archive simplifies email management operations with improved reporting and offers an enhanced migration toolkit to facilitate migration between email platforms.
Novell’s relationships with other companies were also mentioned in [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9].
Novell Brainshare is set to return to Europe. The event, which last ran five years ago, is taking place in Amsterdam from 18-21 May 2010.
[...]
Javier Colado, president EMEA, Novell, said: “The return of Novell BrainShare EMEA in 2010 is a reflection of our focus on helping customers, prospects and partners. As we embark on our strategy of intelligent workload management, it was important we provided a forum for customers, partners and prospects to come together to listen, see and discuss how it could be applied to their organisations.”
Groupwise gets promoted in the following new video that someone has put in YouTube.
Here is another new video which is probably not related to this company.
According to a survey sponsored by Novell, IDC states that more than half of their respondents are planning to increase adoption of Linux on the server.
This video titled “Cloud Computing: Beyond the Hype” was uploaded by Novell some days ago and it spreads Novell’s marketing messages, right from the mouths of the company’s management (including Ron Hovsepian). Novell is still unable to make a business case, so customers walk away. █
How does the interoperability agreement with Microsoft relate to the IWM launches? [The Microsoft/Novell Partnership announced in 2006 gives interoperability and virtualisation solutions for firms using both Windows and Linux]
The agreement means that Microsoft can run their virtualised applications on our environment and we can run ours on theirs.
I think it works really well. Our core assumption is that customers are Microsoft customers and have multiple Java technology stacks. So in a virtualized environment, this relationship allows us to support and optimise those workloads.
This puts us in a stronger position than competitors such as Red Hat for example.
So our strategy is built on that assumption of heterogeneity. Where firms have multiple technology stacks, we can optimise and build security and governance into them.
Microsoft could do that too. A couple of years ago it was argued that Microsoft could buy the WordPerfect lawsuit along with Novell. █
Summary: Ballmer and Hovsepian are failing once again to obstruct the leader in GNU/Linux servers
RED HAT is up approximately 5% after market close. It delivered its financial results a few hours ago. The stock has reached a very high value, despite Ron Hovsepian and Steve Ballmer (seen above) signing what several Web sites described as an “anti-Red Hat deal” or anti-Red Hat pact.
Open source solutions provider Red Hat Inc. (RHT: News ) is set to announce its third-quarter results after the market close Tuesday. On average, 21 analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expect a profit of $0.16 per share for the quarter on sales of $188.29 million. Analysts’ forecast typically excludes one-time items.
Red Hat Inc. (RHT) reports earnings on Tuesday and is trading right at fresh highs. Thomson Reuters has estimates pegged at $0.16 EPS and $188.49 million in revenues, and while this used to be a takeover target the valuations are now very high and this one almost certainly has to really beat estimates and raise guidance to keep everyone happy.
Red Hat /quotes/comstock/13*!rht/quotes/nls/rht (RHT 31.35, +1.48, +4.96%) is estimated to report a profit of 16 cents a share in the third quarter, according to analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters.
Red Hat Inc (RHT.N) reported higher than-expected profit as the business software maker posted strong growth in the sales of its version of the Linux operating system, sending its stock up 3.5 percent.
Summary: Novell is losing its UK distributors and there is little hope for rebound based on the financial situation and general trend
Hitherto, Novell has been pretending that Microsoft’s patent deal will spell the renaissance of Novell. Not even as a Microsoft subsidiary can Novell be incarnated given that it’s losing business to Microsoft. To give just one example from this week’s news:
Domino’s was using Novell’s GroupWise for about 1,000 users and realized that encryption was necessary to protect the communications involving the employment information that’s transmitted between its stores and its outside benefit providers. The restaurant chain began deploying Proofpoint and Voltage’s encryption products while still on GroupWise because it planned to work with both GroupWise and Microsoft Exchange/Outlook when the company upgraded later, Anderson explains.
That’s what friends like Microsoft are for.
We actually found it interesting that Novell is ‘pulling a Microsoft’ [1, 2, 3, 4] with a new “study” that’s intended to help Novell lobby and elevate sales.
The goal of Novell’s study was to find out what sort of solutions are used by the Hungarian CIOs (focusing on the large enterprises, governmental and educational institutions), if they are content with their current systems, what are the major challenges they face and in what direction do they plan to advance.
Regardless of Novell’s efforts to successfully woo CIOs, its channel in the UK keeps breaking apart.
In the UK Novell has reduced its distribution by 35 percent – including the addition of Avnet in August. Veitkus says he expects its number of ‘non-performing’ resellers to shrink by roughly the same figure.
Software licensing VAR Trustmarque has cut the number of distributors it works with for 14 of its main vendor lines worth a combined £30m annually.
Some 14 distributors bid for the business but only 10 were selected following a three-month tender process that finished last week.
Vendors covered by the tender include Citrix, Novell VMWare, McAfee, Adobe and Websense. Magirus picked up the VMware piece, Interactive Ideas bagged Novell, Arc Technology the McAfee business and e92plus the Websense segment. Other distributors to make the cut include Bell and Computer 2000.
Novell Inc. NOVL said its fiscal fourth-quarter loss widened to $255.7 million, or 74 cents a share, from $16.3 million, or 5 cents a share, in the year-ago period. Excluding one-time items, the IT management software company said it would have reported earnings of 11 cents a share. Revenue fell to $215.6 million from $244.7 million last year.
Software company Novell Inc.’s (NOVL) fiscal fourth-quarter loss widened on a $279 million impairment charge and lower revenue, although revenue from its Linux-platform products increased 14%. Novell, Inc. (NASDAQ:NOVL, $4.04, +$0.13, 3.32%) dropped 1.73 percent to $3.97 on Friday morning pre-market trading session, while on Thursday, shares of Novell were up 3.32 percent and closed on $4.04.
Ron is asleep at the wheel ? No more after a few big customers ?
Submitted by atang1 on Sat, 12/05/2009 – 04:33.
When the chips are down, the CEO has to bring the big customers in? Ron Did British Telecom(security management) and Peugeot(Linux desktop) and Micropsoft paid for Linux services(bugs fixing) for their customers, then silence for years.
One has to examine one’s own destiny? Miguel does not have any technology that can be turned into money?
Netbooks are changing in architecture(simple multicored cpu for realtime vs. virtualization and USB 3.0 bus), data centers are changing to triple play. Where Novel is going, nobody knows. A $billion dollar company has to size and target customers, all the time?
We are stockholders of Novl. Opinions here maybe biased.
In third quarter earnings news, computer networking and services company Novell (NASDAQ:NOVL) reported a loss of 74 cents per share. Analysts had expected a 7 cent per share profit.
Novell has reported a net loss of $256m for the fourth quarter of 2009, compared to a net loss of $16m in the same quarter last year. Revenue declined 12% to $216m.
Novell cannot go on like this forever. Is it time for Ron Hovsepian to beg again? █
This is it folks! We’re almost there for openSUSE 11.2. Time to grab the final 11.2 release candidate and shake out any remaining bugs to get the lizard ready for release. This release includes an updated kernel, Samba, Firefox, and more.
Stephen Shaw (decriptor) and Bryen Yunashko (suseROCKS) have completed their tenure on the Board, and their seats are up for election. There is also a new seat available to be occupied by a non-Novell member.
The KDE 4 experience in openSUSE has been enhanced daily, and while the desktop environment itself has matured significantly since the last release, there has been a constant focus to provide an outstanding delivery of it in openSUSE 11.2.
The highlights include: the openSUSE DVD preselected to KDE 4.3; new Firefox KDE integration; OpenOffice.org KDE 4 integration; consistent KDE artwork; all other standard applications fully ported to KDE 4, including KNetworkManager, Amarok, DigiKam, K3b, Konversation and more.
One blogger calls OpenSUSE 11.2 “the Perfect KDE Distribution.”
OpenSUSE 11.2 comes with a lot of programs that support social networks (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, …etc). Firefox is the king in the area. But if you do not like the default webbased interfaces, you can use other applications like:
* Choqok: New KDE twitter and identi.ca client.
* Kopete: The KDE client now has additional support for Facebook IM protocol.
* Social plasmoids: KDE 4.3 comes with plasmoids for Twitter/identi.ca and openDesktop.
Many major releases of GNU/Linux are coming shortly and this new roundup includes OpenSUSE.
Welcome to the GNU/Linux Educational Server. Here you will find collections of useful courses to help you better use the applications found on the Linux distributions. There are also forums, chatrooms, courses, and help materials at your disposal.
At the front page it states: “This site is generously sponsored by openSUSE-Education project.”
That’s actually a positive contribution from Novell.
SUSE (SLES/SLED)
Here is a somewhat scripted and cocky new video from Ron Hovsepian, Novell’s CEO. We’ve seen more of this type of videos recently — ones where Novell seniors publicly suck up to Intel.
The use of the Teradata software on EC2 is free and good for working with up to one terabyte of data. Teradata runs under Novell Suse Linux Enterprise Server 10.
Samsung, which signed a Microsoft patent deal similar to Novell’s, is still receiving some press for its Microsoft-taxed Linux phones. Some reporters love comparing everything to Apple, which is the wrong thing to do because the target markets are very different.
The 360 service replaces the current Vodafone Live! service and also allows users to back up the entire contents of their phone online, configure the phone’s home screen and manage contacts – in a similar way to Windows Phone’s My Phone service or MobileMe on the iPhone. It will be available across the Vodafone range, and to users on other networks too. Vodafone also confirmed that an iPhone app is in the pipeline.
Summary: The Register on “interoperability and mixed environments” (apparent commercial in disguise)
A REGULAR READER of ours has just watched a Webcast that we previously covered here and criticised. The Webcast goes under the title: “Making IT work in the real world”
Sounds promising and informative, right? The real deal.
This item from The Register on ‘mixed environments’ is what our reader calls “an advert masquerading as technical discussion.” We wrote about this type of practice in the previous post.
“Pay close attention to who the speakers work for,” the informant points out, then giving some examples as follows:
At 6:25 .. please buy our virtualized solution and not that open source Linux stuff ..
The only reason you need virtualization is to save on licenses. With Linux, you can deploy the image any number of times .. DOH !!
At 09:00 Linux training and shortage of skills FUD ?
At 12:43, please go to a mixed Windows/Linux solution. Notice how there is *NO* mention of any other platform.
Oh, wait 13:28 he goes waffling on about licenses.
“IT guys in particular want help in understanding whats the best license model to deploy”
This is classic FUD. Remember this video is aimed at the PHBs who don’t know anything about IT. So basically the talker is telling the CEO the IT staff are not to be trusted. A sad day for The Register.
At 17:40, Linux is relatively new and doesn’t have the decades of support in the real world.
Not as many Linux specialists as other platforms ..
At 19:37: a load of marketing waffle .. going forward bla bla bla …
At 20:12: The Novell/Microsoft alliance is mentioned
At 23:32: Novell is mentioned, it’s the only Linux company mentioned up to now ..
At 25:28: Jose Thomas is interviewed over the phone.
At 3:50: Frank Rego pops up over the phone. It just occurred to me to ask, why didn’t they use the Microsoft video-conferencing app. Oh, wait, that doesn’t actually work in the real world.
“For shame,” summarised the reader, “The Register reduced to spouting free adverts for Microsoft. I assume this is free, or just who ‘sponsored’ it. Notice it’s a video, where we can’t find the text in Google. As usual, aimed squarely at the non-techie CEO.”
To put this in perspective, adds the reader: “What Microsoft did with the MS/Novell deal was to buy some credibility. Street cred with the CEOs of the major companies. Look, see Microsoft has to teach ‘open source’ Novell how to work its own software [...] To have Ballmer on the same platform as Ron Hovsepian (you know those two on your front page).” █
In recently criticizing Yahoo!’s (YHOO) insiders for dumping $233mm in stock over the last 2 years, when they’ve only bought $103k in shares, I would be remiss if I also didn’t call out 2 other executives for big share dumps last week:
1. Craig Mundie, head of research and strategy for Microsoft (MSFT). Craig decided to sell stock worth $1.7mm recently. Craig has resided over Microsoft’s R&D efforts for the last few years. This group eats up nearly $10 billion annually of Microsoft’s free cash flow. It is the group Microsoft looks for to compete in mobile computing or other areas, rather than buying a leading company such as, say, Research In Motion (RIMM). The R&D group has eaten up about $60 billion of Microsoft’s cash in the last 10 years with not much to show for it. This latest share dump is very disappointing to me as a MSFT shareholder, especially given his group’s performance.
“Microsoft is already borrowing money and additional, unannounced layoffs carry on silently.”It is not so gloomy at the Ballmer household, though. While Microsoft’s profits dive about 30%, Steve Ballmer sees his wage increasing by 4%. It’s the same with Novell's CEO, Ron Hovsepian, who enjoys massive bonuses. Jessica Mintz at AP added to the second line of her report: “Microsoft CEO Ballmer gets salary bump at start of fiscal 2009, a year in which profit sinks”
“There is such an overvaluation of technology stocks that it is absurd. I would include our stock in that category. It is bad for the long-term worth of the economy.”
Summary: Novell discovers what it’s like to work with a ‘partner’ like Microsoft now that Novell employees are left to make Microsoft hooks work
Microsoft not only violated the GPL before releasing some kernel hooks for Microsoft’s proprietary software [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8] (Microsoft sent out Ramji to spin it, but he's quitting the company now); it is also showing total lack of interest, if not just the expected indifference. Their semi-ally from Novell, Greg Kroah-Hartman, is now complaining publicly and Microsoft blogs are seeing this.
Greg Kroah-Hartman, a Novell fellow with SuSE Labs and Linux Driver Project lead, posted on September 9 a status update on the drivers being assembled for inclusion in the Linux 2.6.32 kernel, Kroah-Hartman had some harsh words about Microsoft’s participation since its original announcement of its GPL plans in late July.
Microsoft’s developers were missing in action after the company donated GPL-licensed drivers to the Linux kernel community in July, leaving significant work to the Linux community, according to Linux driver project lead and Novell fellow Greg Kroah-Hartman.
“Leaving significant work to the Linux community,” eh? Surely this “Linux community” (translation: Novell engineers) is anxious to get its hands on this code and make it working to increase sales of Microsoft products (Hyper-V), then put GNU/Linux under Windows, just as Ron Hovsepian agreed with Steve Ballmer and publicly confessed in early 2007. █
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