Although it was the first to market, the near invisibility of Microsoft Corp’s Microsoft at Work suggests that the ability of Novell Inc to exploit its NetWare franchise will enable the Provo, Utah company to score another of those rare victories in the market against Microsoft with its Novell Embedded Systems Technology 1.0. The embedded system is based on version 4.0 of NetWare: through this approach, Novell hopes to build on the scalability of NetWare 4.0’s NetWare Directory Services, provide compatibility with the NetWare installed base, and enable users to take advantage of the forthcoming AT&T NetWare Connect Services joint venture with AT&T Corp for communications over the wide area (CI No 2,550). Sometime later this year, no precise date was given, Novell plans to release a consumer-friendly interface codenamed Corsair for Embedded Systems Technology, which is designed to hide network complexity from the end user. It will incorporate a Ferret browser, and communicate with AT&T NetWare Connect Service, the Internet, and Tuxedo, Novell’s transaction processing monitor. Unlike the Microsoft at Work initiative, Novell Embedded Systems Technology is also designed to be processor- and operating system-independent. To broaden the base of it s appeal it is written in C, and Novell has been at pains to say that it will work with developers wanting to implement their own operating systems, to help resolve compatibility issues. For this same reason, Novell says it does want to provide compatibility with competing systems – including Microsoft at Work and Echelon Corp’s LONworks. Indeed, Novell had originally intended to base Novell Embedded Systems Technology on FlexOS, the embedded real-time operating system it acquired with the purchase of Digital Research Inc in 1991. But it abandoned the plan because of the portability issue: according to Darl McBride, who heads Novell’s embedded systems division when we started on the project… we found that FlexOS was so geared to a specific environment, and so tied to the iAPX-86 design, and not portable, that we had to create a [new] architecture.
Television set-top boxes
A group of 12 early adopters that are placing the NetWare client within their devices were announced at the product’s launch. Ricoh Co, Fujitsu Ltd, Lexmark International Inc, Xerox Corp, Canon Inc, Andover Controls Inc, IC Card Inc, I-Data, Securicor Telecoms, Castelle Inc, Digital Products Inc and QMS Inc. Although they come from a relatively narrow range of fields, Novell, which says it is aiming to attract a thousand million users by the year 2000, nevertheless hopes to have the technology adopted in other types of device, including television set-top boxes, Personal Digital Assistants, and home appliances. Novell is in highly-guarded talks with Echelon Corp, the Palo Alto, California-based pioneer of the embedded operating system concept – b ut while there has been gossip that Novell might be keen to buy the company, Keith Raffel, marketing director for Echelon says that while the company has been in talks with Novell for some time, there is no question of Novell buying Echelon. Still refusing to be drawn on what the talks do concern, he was also unable to say when the companies might go public on what they are discussing. Echelon’s LONworks system is not processor- or operating system-independent, it is essentially a distributed network operating system-on-a-chip, but it would enable Novell to extend Novell Embedded Systems Technology compatibility into very low-end devices, since LONworks’ big selling point has been its cost. Echelon has now got the price for its Motorola Inc- and Toshiba Corp-produced Neuron chips down to $5, and according to Raffel, they could halve this price in the very foreseeable future. This would enable Novell to extend compatibility into currently unintelligent home appliances. The lower-end appeal of LONworks is also reflected in the developer pricing of the system: while Novell will charge $50,000 for five licences for internal development and 25 licence
s for beta testing, Echelon has just launched NodeBuilder, an application development tool, costing just $4,000. For Novell, McBride would also not be drawn on the Echelon talks preferring instead to talk about the nice complement between the two systems, and likening the corporation to a circulatory system, with Novell Embedded Systems Tech nology as the arteries, and LONworks as the smaller capilliaries. The dark horse in the emerging embedded control race is the proposals IBM Corp has put up in Japan (CI No 2,599), but some reports have suggested that this is nothing more substantial than an interface standard.
