Following its Univel venture with Unix System Laboratories Inc (CI No 1,819), Novell Inc yesterday underlined its role as an increasingly pivotal player in the latest round of industry realignments by detailing a raft of joint projects underway with bustling Hewlett-Packard Co. Topping the bill is a development effort that will see Novell’s NetWare network operating system implemented on Precision Architecture RISC systems, said by Novell to be the first native implementation of NetWare – as opposed to its portable cousin – for a RISC CPU. The work is not due for completion until 1993 and the end product is intended to provide the same functionality as NetWare on the Intel iAPX-86 processor family. Hewlett has also signed a distribution deal under which it will market bundled Novell products, including NetWare, on its systems worldwide. Pricing and availability will be announced by next summer. In the meantime, Portable NetWare will be be offered running on top of HP-UX Unix on Series 9000 800 servers from the beginning of 1992; prices go from $2,725 to $25,000. Portable NetWare has been shipping for the proprietary HP 3000 systems since last summer. Also revealed were five other joint projects, the most notable being that parts of Hewlett-Packard’s NewWave environment, and NetLS, its network licensing tool, will be integrated with NetWare, which, officials claim, will reduce network administration time needed by up to a third.
