Summary: A weekly glance at what Novell has been doing and how it gets characterised by the news

NOVELL is not sold yet and its stock has been keeping steady. Articles about the stock this week (from old to recent) are [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] and the company also got mentioned in some partners' press releases [1, 2].

One of Novell's more recent partners is Amazon, which signed a Linux patent deal with Microsoft after it had hired many executives from there. Both Novell and Amazon put Microsoft patent tax on GNU/Linux and they still celebrate a Fog Computing alliance:

In US cents per hour for the European market, SUSE is pitching in at 12.5 cents for a default implementation. This is a half of a cent more expensive than Windows. Amazon’s Linux at 9.5 cents is somewhat cheaper but Red Hat Linux, at 21 cents, appears much more expensive, especially when you add its $19 per month per customer surcharge.

The confusing issue is that Red Hat controls its distribution and its charge includes support. Support from AWS for basic Linux is the same as it charges for Windows. This is a monthly charge of $100 for Silver level and $400 for Gold. Support for Novell is charged by Novell at the equivalent of around $230.

There is a growing mass of evidence that Novell has decided to aim for Fog Computing, including some new articles that make that explicit, more recently in the Middle East [1, 2].

Another side of Novell, mail and collaboration, is purely proprietary. GroupWise support is still mentioned in some places and GWAVACon is coming despite Novell's unknown future.

Here is a new press release about GroupWise support and here is a defection:

County offices, including the sheriff’s department, changed policy on how long emails should be kept in fall 2009, when the county switched its email service from Novell to Microsoft, the county coordinator said.

Here are some new security issue and an old story of data loss resurfacing in the news:

In 2003, only three days after DiGioia moved from New York to Florida to start his Altamonte Springs IT job, the city's network engineer walked up to him and said, "We've just lost everything. All the Novell servers, the Novell clusters, the backup, the SAN. Everything's gone," he recalls.

A little something about ZENworks:

LiveTime is pre-integrated with Novell ZENworks Configuration Management (ZCM) 10 and 11, ZENworks Desktop Management 6.5 or later, ZENworks Asset Management 6.5 or later, as well as eDirectory and closed loop email management with Groupwise 6, 7, and 8. This comprehensive integration allows customers to leverage their existing infrastructure for immediate ROI and improved customer service. In addition, LiveTime integrates with Novell's Identity Manager 4 and runs on all editions of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

The PR blog of Novell is still just marketing proprietary software roughly 90% of the time. One example of that was triple-posted by Michele Hudnall just a few days ago [1, 2, 3] and Novell's marketing chief John Dragoon calls or compares marketing to business, still relying on the widely-held misconception that marketing actually produces something. It only changes how people think or feel. Novell is good at that. ⬆