Orem, Utah-based Novell Inc’s reasons for becoming the largest investor in Unix System Laboratories Inc are becoming ever more apparent as reports circulate around the industry of the company’s plans to base its future strategy on Unix networking. The company has recently restructured to create a new business unit to concentrate on Unix and wide area networking, under the control of Novell executive Kanwal Rekhi. And details of a new plan to develop a single version of NetWare to run under Unix, MS-DOS and OS/2 are indicative of the company’s determination to move further towards open environments. While Novell’s Portable NetWare plans are now well advanced, new releases of NetWare will be working towards providing a single set of source code, according to US press reports. The new implementation, using C++ and object-oriented techniques, will run in native mode, as opposed to the emulation approach taken by Portable NetWare, and will therefore offer faster performance. It will also mean an easier upgrade path for MS-DOS and OS/2 customers. And Novell has reached definitive agreement to acquire Digital Research Inc, obviating the need for Novell customers to buy anything from Microsoft Corp. It said the agreement was in response to customer demand for tightly coupling network operating system software in with desktop and host computer operating systems.
