06.14.08
Gemini version available ♊︎Do-No-Evil Saturday – Part IV: Novell News Leftovers (SCO, Virtualisation, and More)
As more people leave to go on vacation this time of the year, there’s also less news. Here are just a few picks which were left out from previous Saturday posts because they are not directly related to GNU/Linux.
SCO
The SCO-Novell case is due to be decided on pretty soon, but there is some more new action over there.
Novell has filed its Response to Debtors’ Second Motion to Extend Exclusivity [PDF], and you could sum up its message to the court like this: Enough already, but if you do grant another extension, please let it be the last.
Virtualisation
Novell’s acquisition of PlateSpin got is a little closer to the virtualisation arena. It will have some presence in this new conference.
Stephen is a seasoned IT veteran, now in a senior Business Development role with Novell. Prior to Novell, Stephen was founder and CEO of PlateSpin and led the long-term business strategy for the company. PlateSpin was recently acquired by Novell.
Novell does not get omitted from this list, either.
Is Virtual Storage required for datacenter agility?
[...]
It would appear to me that the last thing an IT decision-maker would want is to have processing automated and orchestrated by products such as those offered by, Cassatt, Scalent Systems, Racemi, VMLogix, Novell, Virtual Iron, or VMware, while storage (application and data files) was tied to specific systems
Miscellaneous
A fairly severe vulnerability in Novell’s GroupWise was found last week. It triggered quite a few alarms.
It’s always useful to keep track of Novell clients or companies that Novell employs. AppLabs falls into the latter category.
Global IT services firm AppLabs specializes in testing and quality management.
[...]
Q: Who are your customers?
A: We generally have two types of client typically in the top Global 2000: established service providers who we already have a relationship in place and bring AppLabs on board to do testing as a third party. That makes up 60% of our business. The second group, making up 40% of our business, are companies that have never really done much work on outsourcing and testing is the first thing they are thing about outsourcing. Customers in the US include Novell and Sun, while in the UK we have Nationwide, Royal Bank of Scotland, and the Turquoise equities exchange, which is due to go live in October.
Here is an optimistic take on Novell’s recent financial results, which also tells the story of SiteScape’s and PlateSpin’s integration into the company,
Novell also delivered on its second strategic ambition (to grow product revenues at or better than market growth rates) for Linux, systems and resource management, and identity and access management. Workgroup product revenues did shrink, as usual, but only by 1%, and invoicing increased for the first time, positioning Novell to deliver its the third strategic ambition, to achieve workgroup product revenues of at least $285 million to $300 million (of which $209 million have already been delivered).
The SiteScape and PlateSpin acquisitions did not impact its revenues much, though. While we expect Novell to eventually leverage the latter, we have doubts about the former. We agree that SiteScape enables GroupWise to catch up with the competition, but Novell needs to do better to turn GroupWise’s improved position into actual market traction. The company believes that GroupWise will be able to piggyback on Novell’s growing success in the Linux area. We do not share this belief.
Not a busy week, but nonetheless, the week to come will be a busy one for SUSE. Novell will try to generate OpenSUSE hype amid the big release. █
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