Open Software Foundation, IBM win in Novell Unix deal, says Gartner
A Research Note issued by the Gartner Group in the wake of Novell Inc’s proposed acquisition of Unix System Laboratories Inc judges the Open Software Foundation and IBM Corp to be net winners from the deal – the Foundation because it might get additional royalties for its technologies, particularly Distributed Computing Environment, and IBM because Novell is less threatening than Microsoft Corp and a divided market will be easier for the Taligent Pink operating system to negotiate. Gartner estimates Microsoft a loser but not by much. Unix and NetWare with Novell ain’t no Windows NT-killer, it says. Only Microsoft itself could seriously screw it up (a faint probability). On the other hand, standard NT will include at no extra charge many of the same functions now handled by NetWare. Once NT is installed in a NetWare local network, Microsoft will have the opportunity to point out to users that NetWare (especially prior to version 4) is largely superfluous. Gartner also sees the sale inducing Microsoft to accelerate its effort to offer better support for standards like the Software Foundation’s Distributed Computing Environment, Distributed Management Environment and X/Open Co Ltd’s Portability Guide It says Microsoft will likely be driven to support an optional Unix System V.4 personality atop the NT kernel by 1995 or 1996 and that such a beast will be brought to life by a third party – the Santa Cruz Operation Inc is nominated for the role. Sun Microsystems Inc is Gartner’s other nominee as a net loser. It will be a lot harder now to sell Solaris-on-Intel and find distribution channels and will also put pressure on Sun to support mainstream technology like Distributed Computing Environment and Motif. Gartner believes that by 1995 Sun will compromise much more substantially than it previously has, de-emphasising Sun-specific application programming interfaces and services such as Open Network Computing and Open Look in favour of X/Open, the Foundation and Unix Labs-endorsed interfaces.
The future of Roel Pieper and the true value being put on the agreement
Betting pools are forming on how long president Roel Pieper stays with Unix Labs. Despite what the press releases say, maybe he will never go with Novell. Maybe he’ll stay with AT&T Co on Bob Kavner’s team, working to become king. Maybe he’ll go to Novell and gracefully steal away at the opportune moment. Bets that he’ll take over as president of Novell may not take into account the short life span of any of Novell’s prior heirs apparent. People who know him say Ray Noorda regards all of his lieutenants as highly dispensable as he noticeably wearies of them quickly. They also say Noorda won’t name a successor until he’s carried out of the building on a stretcher. Meantime Novell’s purchase of Unix Labs includes its balance sheet, which means the $40m Unix Labs has in the bank. On the liability side is the 8% of the stock reserved for the employees, which is being handled as debt. Unix Labs appears to have been valued at around $355m, up $30m from the private placing 18 months ago. We’ve found no one yet willing to tell us what the collar is, the high and low value of the stock in a swap such as this, so it’s impossible to estimate the actual value of the deal.
Observers believe that Unix’s days as an independent entity are now numbered
The question of the moment turns on just how tightly bonded Unix System Laboratories Inc and Novell Inc will become once the one belongs to the other. A definitive agreement that outlines exactly what kind of a subsidiary Unix System Laboratories Inc will be, and how independent of Novell it will remain, has yet to be written, but will have to be before the acquisition can go through. The party line adopted by both companies maintains that Unix Labs will be free-standing and that their two product lines will be kept distinct for the foreseeable future. However, Novell itself raised the issue of increasing the integration and interoperability of NetWare and Unix,
so it seems only fair to ask how much and under what circumstances, especially when the pair are still hammering out substantive issues relative to Unix Labs’s independence and the future of the industry. The Worst case scenario – maybe – is that Unix disappears as a separate entity, absorbed completely, for the greater good of Novell, into NetWare. This is what a lot of responsible people think has actually happened or logically will happen soon enough, despite what Novell, Unix Labs and AT&T are saying publicly. They reason that a lot of what is in NetWare right now sorely needs replacing and that that is why Ray Noorda sought to buy Unix in the first place. Eventually Novell will make Unix and NetWare indistinguishable. Why will it need Unix Labs after that? Both Unix Labs and Novell have the same OEM customers. Isn’t it easier to buy from a single source? Poof, there goes Unix Labs. The same is true of Univel Inc – which is already so tightly bound to Novell it uses the same premises and the self-same order-entry system. Once Univel softens up the marketplace and the marketplace protests that it has only so much money and can’t possibly buy both NetWare and UnixWare, poof, Univel is integrated back into Novell. Survivors of Novell’s Excelan and Digital Research acquisitions claim that this is all going to happen quicker than a June bug hops onto a ripe fig. Unix Labs is given no more than a six-month honeymoon, starting now. It then becomes nothing more than a research and development site for Novell. Its sales, marketing and communications hub is shifted either to Provo, Utah or to Novell’s offices in California. Its sales and marketing staff is dispersed. The acquisition is complete.
Novell missed one open systems boat when it was approached by X/Open
It seems that Novell Inc missed a first call of the open systems boat back in its dim and distant proprietary past, when Reading, Berkshire-based X/Open Co Ltd was casting around for interface technology that could tie personal computer networks into open systems. The standards body approached the (soon-to-be) keeper of Unix about the possibility of using Portable NetWare protocols for the task. Novell’s reply, insiders claim, was simply no. It was left to Sun Microsystems Inc with PC/NFS and Microsoft Corp with LAN Manager to supply the X/Open interfaces.
