Novell Drops Another Event and Loses Major Contract with City of Los Angeles

Dr. Roy Schestowitz

2009-08-01 15:26:16 UTC
Modified: 2009-08-01 15:26:16 UTC

Summary: Another event off the calendar for Novell

FIRST it was BrainShare 2009 and now this:

For the first time ever, Salt Lake hosted the Meeting Professionals International.

"That is the association of people who plan meetings and conventions for a living," White explained.

But Novell won't be meeting at the Salt Palace this year; it's their first cancellation in 20 years. They've promised to be back next year.

BrainShare 2009 was canceled due to low demand and Novell is working hard to make it happen next year, which is still doubtful because Novell has debt and problematic business performance.

In other news, it seems as though the City of Los Angeles will soon abandon GroupWise. That's a lot of lost seats.

The controversy centers on a plan by the City of Los Angeles to replace its Novell GroupWise e-mail and Microsoft Office applications with Google Apps. Under the $7.25 million plan, the city will transition about 30,000 users to Google's e-mail and office productivity products by the end of December 2009.

Yesterday we wrote about Novell losijng the ACCC as a customer. Here is another report about Novell being dumped.

The ACCC has 790 users with 888,000 documents in the TRIM repository, and over 4.6 million MS Office documents on Novell file and print servers around the country. These servers will be decommissioned as part of the centralisation process. Once the new interface is deployed, all documents will be lodged and searched through TRIM to the central platform housed in Canberra, thereby removing the need for personal or network drives.

Like all companies, Novell will pretend it's business as usual. Fair enough, everyone's doing it. But to assume Novell is a safe long-term bet is not so smart. ⬆

Comments

zatoichi

2009-08-01 18:30:36

It's interesting to me how Roy slants the "Groupwise" story. In fact, it's not nearly the slamdunk that Roy would seem to like to think it is that Google will get the City of Los Angeles business: serious, and quite legitimate, concerns about security and privacy have been raised by a number of stakeholders:

The migration would make Google, which hosts the servers running the applications, responsible for retaining and protecting sensitive health care and litigation data along with criminal and drug investigation records. Since the plan was proposed, critics from various organizations, including the Los Angeles Police Department, the city attorney's office and public interest groups have raised questions about the privacy and security implications of storing sensitive data in the cloud for access via the public Internet. The concerns received a fresh airing following the recent Twitter Inc. security breach caused by an attacker gaining access to a worker's e-mail on the Gmail system hosted by Google.

Roy's happy, I guess, to sacrifice security and privacy as long as it hurts Novell. Luckily, the LAPD, the LA city attorney, and a lot of other people show better sense.
JohnD

2009-08-02 05:28:57

Nice job linking back to your own stories and completely ignoring the profit posted last quarter in addition to the debt buy back that ran from 6/15 to 7/14. I'm guessing we'll find out how much debt is left during the next quarterly report. Of course instead of looking at Novell canceling a meeting as a smart business move, you view it as a sign of their demise. I enjoyed your creative "editing" of the LA story too.

zatoichi

2009-08-02 13:35:12

All the News That's Fit to Misrepresent!

We Need to Liberate the Client Side and Userspace Too: Lots of work remains to be done
Recent IRC Logs (Since Site Upgrade): better late than never
Techrights Videos Will be Back Soon: We want do publish video without any of the underlying complexity and this means changing some code
Microsoft is Faking Its Financial Performance, Buying Companies Helps Perpetuate the Big Lies (or Pass the Debt Around): Our guess is that Microsoft will keep pretending to be huge, even as the market share of Windows (and other things) continues to decrease
Techrights Will Tell the Story (Until Next Year!) of How Since 2022 It Has Been Under a Coordinated Attack by a Horde of Vandals and Nutcases: People like these belong in handcuffs and behind bars (sometimes they are) and our readers still deserve to know the full story. It's a cautionary tale for other groups and sites
Why It Became Essential to Split GNU/Linux Stories from the Rest: These sites aren't babies anymore. In terms of age, they're already adults.
Losses and Gains in an Age of Oligarchy - A Techrights Perspective: If you don't even try to fix something, there's not even a chance it'll get fixed
Google (and the Likes Of It) Will Cause Catastrophic Information Loss Rather Than Organise the World's Information: Informational and cultural losses due to technological plunder
Links 28/09/2023: GNOME 45 Release Party, 'Smart' Homes Orphaned: Links for the day
Security Leftovers: Xen, breaches, and more
GNOME Console Won’t Support Color Palettes or Profiles; Will Support Esperanto: Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
Let's Hope GNU Makes it to 100: Can GNU still be in active use in 2083? Maybe.
GNU is 40, Linux is Just 32: Today it's exactly 40 years since Richard Stallman sent a message regarding GNU
GNU/Linux and Free Software News Mostly in Tux Machines Now: We've split the coverage
Links 27/09/2023: GNOME Raves and Firefox 118: Links for the day
Links 27/09/2023: 3G Phase-Out, Monopolies, and Exit of Rupert Murdoch: Links for the day
IBM Took a Man’s Voice, Pitting Him Against His Own Work, While Companies Profit from Low-Effort Garbage Generated by Bots and “Self-Service”: Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
Links 26/09/2023: KDE, Programming, and More: Links for the day
Mozilla Promotes the Closed Web and Proprietary Webapps That Are Security and Privacy Hazards: This is just another reminder that the people who run Mozilla don't know the history of Firefox, don't understand the Web, and are beholden to "GAFAM", not to Firefox users
Debian More Like an Exploitative Sweatshop Than a Family: Wiltshire is riding a high horse in the UK, talking down to Indians who are "low-level" volunteers in his kingdom of authoritarians, guarded by an army of British lawyers who bully bloggers
Small Computers in Large Numbers: A Pipeline of Open Hardware: They guard and prioritise their "premiums", causing severe price hikes due to supply/demand disparities.
Microsoft Deserves a Medal for Being Worst at Security (the Media Deserves a Medal for Cover-up): There are still corruptible/bribed publishers that quote Microsoft staff like they're security gurus
Real Life Should be Offline, Not Online, and It Requires Free Software: Resistance means having the guts to say "no!", even in the face of great societal burden and peer pressure
10 Reasons to Permanently Export or Liberate Your Site From WordPress, Drupal, and Other Bloatware: There are certainly more more advantages, but 10 should suffice for now
About 200,000 Objects in Techrights Web Site: This hopefully helps demonstrate just how colossal the migration actually is
Good Teachers Would Tell Kids to Quit Social Control Media Rather Than Participate in It (Teaching Means Education, Not Misinformation): Insist that classrooms offer education to children rather than offer children to corporations
Twitter: From Walled Gardens to Paywalls and/or Amplifiers of Fascism: There's moreover a push to promote politicians who are as scummy as Twitter's owner
The World Wide Web is Being Confiscated From Us (Like Syndication Was Withdrawn About a Decade Ago) and We Need to Fight Back: We're worse off when fewer people promote RSS feeds and instead outsource to social control media (censorship, surveillance, manipulation)
Next Up: Restoring IRC Log Pipelines, Bulletins/Full Text RSS, Wiki (Archived, Static), and Pipelines for Daily Links: There are still many tasks left ahead of us, but we've progressed a lot
An Era of Rotting Technology, Migration Crises, and Cliffhanging: We've covered examples from IBM, resembling the Microsoft world

Novell Drops Another Event and Loses Major Contract with City of Los Angeles

Comments

Recent Techrights' Posts