The wave of new partnerships and technology announcements that accompanied Novell Inc’s Brainshare user event this year are a testament to the wind CEO Eric Schmidt has breathed into the company’s sails by single-mindedly focusing on Novell Directory Services and the internet. Although the market has yet to bless Schmidt’s work as a full blown turnaround, Novell’s stock closed at $27.25, a price not realized since late 1993.

Yesterday the company was able to reveal new agreements with Cabletron, Lucent and Compaq for NDS as well as bundling two web application servers – IBM’s WebSphere and Oracle’s WebDB – with NetWare. It also announced Dell as the first official licensee of its Internet Caching System. In addition, it previewed an alpha version of Digitalme, a new personal web security mechanism variously described as a digital safe deposit box for personal information – see separate story.

As Novell’s corporate and marketing focus on NDS begins to outshine the NetWare network operating system which is still the company’s meat and potatoes, Novell’s claim to be heir apparent to internet e-commerce and corporate network services means its chief competition is not Microsoft Corp and its Active Directory, but America OnLine’s Netscape Communications Corp.

In his keynote, Schmidt described directories as the next interesting platform on the net, which together with Digitalme and the unbundling of its Internet Caching system to support network appliances, looks like playing directly against other end-to-end internet network services including Netscape and to some extent, Sun Microsystems.

Novell executives said the delivery of total directory solutions are its key goal this year, noting that with the advent of directory services Microsoft’s internet boilerplate Where do you want to go today? is no longer appropriate. The question should be what do you want to do today?

Novell used Brainshare to demonstrate its claim that as networks grow in size, so a new 8.0 cut of NDS that it calls SKADS (for Scalable Kick-Ass Directory Service) outpaces Netscape on directory searches by 30 times at 500 million objects. Such a directory could hold more than two entries for every user on the internet, it claims. Netscape is faster on smaller directories because it reportedly uses a solid-state memory cache architecture rather than searching from disk.

The internet-enabled NDS 8.0 will be available for NetWare 5.0 within 60 days followed by Windows NT and Unix versions. The current NDS for NT still requires at least one NetWare server on the network. It is not used to run the directory, but to accommodate NDS utilities that are currently being ported to NT. Novell has been demonstrating a single NDS tree that can hold more than a billion objects, with millions of objects per server. Other products in the pipeline include 12-way clustering, new caching services and the 10 NDS-enabled applets it calls Zens.

The agreement with IBM sees the standard version of WebSphere web application deployment server licensed to Novell for bundling in NetWare. The agreement is an important one for IBM, which is spending heavily to establish the WebSphere brand and is gradually moving more and more of its web development and e- commerce technologies under the umbrella. Novell can also resell the advanced edition of WebSphere enabling users to enhance web sites for security, OLTP and e-commerce, and to connect web applications to existing host-based OLTP systems. NetWare users can alternatively choose to use the five-user version of Oracle WebDB application server, which is to be bundled with NetWare in an expansion of the database bundling deal announced last year.

Cabletron is to integrate NDS into its Spectrum and SmartSwitch router and in an expanded agreement, Lucent Technologies is integrating NDS into all of its QIP IP address management technologies for use on NetWare, Unix and NT. The two said back in January that they would be integrating NDS with QIP Enterprise 5

.0. QIP Express and other QIP products are now also being NDS- enabled. The two say they will reveal product details and timescales shortly.

Compaq is also supporting NDS, and Dell is licensing Novell’s Internet Caching system for its servers. The software runs on Intel-based NetWare, Unix, NT and on Cisco Systems networking equipment. Dell will be marketing the product as an internet caching appliance that offloads routine tasks from a web server and stores frequently accessed web pages.