It enables big businesses seeking to cut server costs, offers small and medium businesses low-price software and broadens vendors’ market reach. Above all, Linux is cheap.
Novell Inc, seems to concur with Wladawsky-Berger, at least on the latter point – Linux is a technology that can help Novell attract new customers, growing market share.
Consequently, Novell this week announced its intention to put a Linux kernel in version 7.0 of its NetWare operating system, which is due after version 6.5 this summer. Novell’s target audience is small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) and companies migrating from Windows and Solaris to the cheaper Linux-based alternative.
You’d be excused for thinking Novell’s support for Linux marks the end of the end, rather than the beginning of the end, for the troubled NetWare. Novell’s decision to embrace Linux comes roughly four years into Linux, during which time NetWare has continued its stately decline.
Analyst Gartner recently said that Novell held 4% of global server operating system sales in 2002 and predicted that number would fall to 1.3% by 2006. Novell today claims 90 million license NetWare users on 4 million servers. It’s a long way from the early 1990s, when NetWare held 70% of the network operating system market.
Carl Ledbetter, Novell senior vice president of engineering and research speaking to ComputerWire, predicted Novell can use Linux to revive its own business. The NetWare business has been flat in the enterprise world and declining in the small business world. Linux has the market share of NetWare. We can double our market and it also gets the Solaris and Windows defectors, he said.
In a strange twist of logic, Novell insists that its support for Linux also demonstrates long-term commitment to NetWare. Novell claims it is also giving those clients leaving Windows or Solaris a choice of Netware of Linux in one package, but believes – given that choice – customers will pick NetWare for advanced features like remote fail over.
There is more than one fly in the ointment of Novell’s strategy, though. Why should customers return to a company notorious for ignoring the channel and failing to keep customers updated? Also, why should anyone adopting Linux consider a diversion in their journey towards NetWare?
On this first point, Novell claims it is placing greater emphasis on its channel. On the second, Novell believes it can add value to open source and Linux, technologies only slowly accumulating business-class applications, with what it calls services.
Novell defines these services as traditional NetWare elements such as file and print, which Ledbetter said are being written to an abstraction layer. That abstraction layer means services could be dropped onto either the Linux or NetWare kernel without ad-hoc modification, Ledbetter said.
Newer services include Novell’s eXtend application server and tools, acquired with SilverStream Software. NetWare will support market-leaders BEA Systems Inc’s WebLogic and IBM Corp’s WebSphere, but Novell appears to believe it can use exteNd to establish a strong market application server presence in the virgin market of Linux.
There is a human element to all of this: developers and consultants. Novell used BrainShare to launch Forge Web for open source developers to download, modify, exchange and update open source code released by Novell such as its DSML support for eDirectory. The company also released code for its Nsure Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) Server.
NetWare as an applications platform will never get the traction of Windows. But with APIs and development tools that extend it, and things in open source and Linux, we are going to see a resurgence in Novell, Ledbetter predicted.
The program, though, doesn’t exactly make Novell stand out as a leader. IBM, BEA and Source Forge, for example, are building big, heavily promoted developer communities around their platforms or open source while UDDI has failed to live up to industry expectations.
Consultants also figure in Novell’s plans. The company that acquired services company Cambridge Technology Partners Inc in 2001 said that consultants play an important part in its plans to help customers migrate from Windows and Solaris to Linux. Novell announced a practice around migration at BrainShare.
Linux may be humble, as Wladawsky-Berger, said but for the former network operating system giant, the kernel represents the latest phase in an ongoing struggle to find a viable role in corporate IT. Whether Novell stops NetWare’s decline or establishes itself against larger and better financed Linux operatives like IBM remains to be seen.
Source: Computerwire
