Novell Approach -- Redmond Channel Partner

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Novell Approach

I love Novell. This company has been on the ropes more than Ali in Zaire. But like Muhammad, Novell clearly has the knock-out punch. Whereas Wang, DG and WordPerfect all died because they couldn't escape their legacy, Novell did. NT killed NetWare and Office killed WordPerfect (which Novell bought), but yet Novell not only survives, but prospers.

Don't believe me? Well, why else would a hedge fund offer a cool $2 billion (in cash) for Novell?

I've seen enough companies come and go, and I've covered Novell on and off for almost three decades. Novell's survival and success are something we should all admire.

What's your best or worst Novell memory? Stories may be passed along to dbarney@redmondmag.com.

Posted by Doug Barney on March 05, 2010 at 9:57 AM

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Reader Comments

Fri, Mar 5, 2010 Tim Wessels Novell not down for the count yet...

Well I can't comment on the value of Novell's real estate holdings, but they do have almost $1B in cash and short term assets. Novell pioneered the file server OS in the 1980s as well as being agnostic on network topology. In the 1990s they released a distributed and replicated directory service that is multi-platform, fast and easy to work with compared to AD. After 2000 Novell went all-in on open source and acquired its own Linux distribution. Today, Novell is a hybrid business built on an open source stack with proprietary services layered on top. The question for Novell in 2010 is whether they can leverage what they know and understand about identity management and computing workload management into securing cloud applications and services. The jury is out on this until later in the year but I don't know if I would bet against them.

Fri, Mar 5, 2010

As an administrator, I truly miss Netware and NDS. That combo had capabilities a decade ago,that Windows Server and Active Directory still haven't figured out. For instance, with a single click you could see all the computers in which a user had logged in, or a listing of every file and directory that user had rights on every server in the network. Want to grant rights to a directory and everything in it? No matter how large the file structure, the rights would be granted in a about a microsecond. In Windows, you have to wait until the rights are written individually to every file and directory below. I've had it take as long as 3 hours on one large drive running Windows!

Fri, Mar 5, 2010

Years ago when they began to lose the server market to MS, I remember asking about their viability and was always told that they held so much real estate that they would never go under. I wonder if that is still the case and if this buyout includes it all or portions of the business.....