Kicking off its annual BrainShare festivities with a flurry of news, Novell Inc says Moab, its NetWare 5 release which uses TCP/IP as its native communication method, will include what it claims is the fastest available Java Virtual Machine for running server-based Java applications. NetWare 5, a third and final beta of which is due by the end of April, will come boxed with a five- user version of Oracle8 when it ships mid-year. In fact all NetWare 4.11 and higher releases will ship with the database from June on. Moab will also have a Java console interface. Novell claims that using the Key Labs’ VolanoMark benchmark, its JVM performed more than twice as fast as the nearest competitor, Microsoft’s JVM on Windows NT Server. Novell will also continue to support IPX in NetWare 5. New features of the NetWare 5 third beta include the ‘Houston’ Java GUI for managing the NetWare server, an enhanced version of the NDS directory service supporting LDAP v.3 Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, directory catalog services for searching the directory and a new server setup routine. Morgan Stanley analyst Chuck Phillips thinks CEO Eric Schmidt’s key contribution in the year he’s been in charge has been clearing excess inventory out of the channel and improving the flow of products to market. Problem is that Windows NT installations are now outstripping those of NetWare for the first time. The bank sees (excluding upgrade business), 1.3 million copies of NT going out in 1997 compared with 0.9 million NetWare ship and 0.7 million instances of Unix. Novell’s bundling deal with Oracle dates back to last March’s agreement to develop enhanced integration capabilities between NetWare, NDS, Oracle data server and Oracle application server. For more details see our sister publication Network Briefing.
