Novell Inc’s promised internal re-organisation fell into place at the end of last week with the merging of the NetWare and Unix Systems Group into a Novell Systems Group, which accounts for 55% of the company’s annual revenue, currently $1,045m. The group is headed by executive vice-president and general manager Richard King who reports to president and chief executive Bob Frankenberg. The group is broken down into four separate profit and loss divisions. Mike DeFazio, formerly executive vice-president and general manager of the Unix Systems Group, becomes senior vice-president development of the Operating Systems Division which will be responsible for all core operating system development, including the integration of UnixWare and NetWare into one system, currently known as SuperNOS, desktop operating system integration and the NetWare, Unix source and UnixWare businesses. Toby Corey, formerly vice-president marketing for the NetWare Products Group leads a new integrated product marketing team as vice-president marketing of that division. Darl McBride heads the Extended Networks Division, which includes Embedded Systems Technology for NetWare or NEST, as vice-president and general manager. Joe Firmage gets the new tools division, formerly the AppWare division, as vice-president and general manager. Joe Menard, one-time marketing vice-president at the old Unix System Labs and latterly head of the Tuxedo effort, gets the distributed services division, which includes NetWare Directory Services, transaction processing and distributed printing, as vice-president and general manager. Engineering teams currently working on separate developments in the same area, for example NetWare and UnixWare file systems or messaging, will be combined. Novell’s two other product groups are the Information Access and Management Group, which includes the new AT&T Corp NetWare Connect Services public data network, and the Application Group which does PerfectOffice, GroupWise and the other Groupware software. SuperNOS – now a 1997 item and expected first as a non-dedicated architecture, later on a microkernel – will be preceded next year by an environment that combines Novell’s Gemini and SkunkWorks developments. Gemini, or NetWare for OS/2, enables the two environments to co-reside on a box. A modified version will initially use shared drivers, one file system, one administration system and other integrated components. SkunkWorks is a project based on the Unix-like Linux public domain software and was originally to have produce Expose, a 32-bit MS-DOS-Windows-NetWare-UnixWare system. A full product blueprint and re-branding strategy is seen in 60 days.
