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 TEST CENTER Up to the challenge? Novell struggles to become a Net services company By P.J. Connolly, InfoWorld Test Center January 12, 2001 The networking pioneer strives to reinvent itself to avoid collapsing under NetWare legacy weight
 BEING A NOVELL customer is like being a Boston Red Sox fan: Disappointment tests loyalties, but the fans ultimately come back season after season. The big difference is that when the Red Sox blow another season, few fans are seriously affected -- many even accept it as inevitable. With Novell, customers feel pressured to re-evaluate their IT strategy year after year due to the company's perpetually declining slice of the server OS market. In fact many NetWare shops have wondered, sometimes with good reason, if they too weren't blinded by company loyalty. Despite the fact that Novell created the LAN market a decade ago, today the pioneer is struggling to reinvent itself as a Net services company. NetWare, the company's flagship product, continues to lose ground against relative upstarts such as Linux and Windows. Last fall's attempt to raise visibility by running television advertisements -- the first time in the company's 12-year history -- only underscored Novell's previous reluctance to do so, and did not change public perception.  Novell's fall from industry leader status emphasizes the importance of public perception as a judge of a company's viability. Novell's image suffered greatly during the mid-1990s due to a combination of often senseless company acquisitions and misdirected product-development efforts. The image didn't improve when NetWare was viewed as a legacy OS after the release of Windows NT in late 1996, and when Novell was reluctant to adopt TCP/IP as a standard networking protocol. Many customers also found third-party developers more interested in building for Windows. But in the past three years, the results-oriented focus of CEO Eric Schmidt has delivered improved and new products centered around the eDirectory (formerly Novell Directory Service or NDS) directory service, which may be the best single piece of technology Novell has going for it. Currently the company seems to have stemmed much of the "mind-share" loss occasioned by the follies of the past decade. Unfortunately, their recent genuine technical triumphs remain overshadowed by Novell's bleak financial picture, which mirrors the current meltdown of the entire high-tech sector. But for a company that seems to be perpetually on the ropes, Novell remains surprisingly competitive. The company is relying less on the bread and butter of NetWare-based file-and-print services, is expanding its definition of the network from the LAN to the Internet, and is providing products that reach across that expanded network. Productive future planned 2001 promises to be a busy year for Novell, with new versions of its NetWare operating system and GroupWise collaboration tools scheduled to ship in the third and second quarters, respectively. Both the NetWare 6 and GroupWise 6 releases are expected to focus on stability as well as scalability. By code-naming GroupWise 6 "Bulletproof," the company seems to be inspired by the Americanism that "it ain't bragging if you can do it." Whether or not this slogan comes back to haunt Novell will be another story. In the meantime, the company will be plenty busy preparing eDirectory 9.0, code-named "Falcon," for a late 2001 release. The DirXML tools, which debuted in fall 2000, are slated for two minor releases: DirXML 1.1 should ship about the same time as the release of NetWare 6 in the third quarter; DirXML 1.2 is expected about the same time that eDirectory 9.0 ships. The combination of NDS's maturity and the exposure of the directory via the DirXML toolset may well prove a solid foundation for the next generation of Internet services. We think they offer Novell its last and best hope for widespread success in the future. eDirectory-based security enhancements like Novell Single Sign-On (NSSO) and Novell Modular Authentication Service (NMAS) are also slated for releases in the spring or early summer. These products in their current releases impressed us (see "Single Sign-on dangles prospect of lower help desk costs" and "NMAS lets users kiss passwords goodbye.") When used together, these solutions allow companies to eliminate the difficulty of maintaining strong password-based security and offers users the convenience of using simpler but equally secure login methods such as biometrics and smart cards. Other directory-based tools that should see a rework in 2001 include the BorderManager caching/firewall/remote authentication/VPN suite and the ZENworks management products. Although ZENworks for Servers 2 only shipped last October and ZENworks for Desktops 3 was released last August, we expect to hear this quarter about their next releases. ZENworks for Servers is now seen as a replacement for both the venerable SNMP-based ManageWise and ZENworks for Networks, which Novell abandoned after its first release last year. How customers react to the confusion in this area is a big question for Novell. A new version of Novell's eDirectory-based Novell Internet Messaging System (NIMS) is also due in the second quarter. Although NIMS lacks the extensive collaborative features of GroupWise, it does offer a highly scalable and stable platform for Internet standards-based messaging. 2001: a make-or-break year One smart thing Novell has done in recent years is to ensure that its products aren't as closely tied to the NetWare OS itself and will run on competing OSes such as Linux, Solaris, and even Windows 2000 and Windows NT. Although Novell failed to make UnixWare a Unix that felt like NetWare, the company seems to have accomplished something even more important by providing a way for shops to expand their NetWare environment to incorporate Linux and Solaris boxes. Some people may call this hedging one's bets, but we think it's just plain business-sense smart. This trend will continue into 2001 as Novell further uncouples the NetWare product cycle from those of its other offerings. Overall, we're cautiously optimistic about Novell's prospects for the future. Smart IT managers have stopped dumping NetWare systems for Windows servers -- and the smartest ones have hung onto them -- but Novell has to continue recreating itself in order to survive. The smart money is starting to bet against a breakup of Microsoft, and customers will be making their dollars work harder than ever before. Novell has to keep moving away from relying upon file-and-print servers to pay the bills and must continue enhancing its Internet management fabric. If Novell fails to recast itself as a Net services company, it may not get another chance, especially with the recent market downturn.  Return to Test Center In Focus Enterprise operating systems P.J. Connolly (pj_connolly@infoworld.com) is a fifth-generation Detroit Tigers fan and a senior analyst in the Test Center. He began managing NetWare systems back when George Bush (senior) was president.  RELATED SUBJECTS  Operating SystemsSPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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