Novell

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Novell, Inc.
Type	Public (NASDAQ: NOVL)
Founded	Provo, Utah (1983)
Headquarters	Waltham, MA, USA
Key people	Ron Hovsepian, CEO and President John Dragoon, Senior Vice President, CMO Dana Russell, Senior Vice President, CFO
Industry	Software
Products	Novell eDirectory Novell Open Enterprise Server SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Novell NetWare SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop Novell GroupWise Novell ZENworks Novell Identity Manager Novell iChain Novell exteNd Novell SecureLogin Novell BorderManager Novell CASA
Revenue	US$1,197.7 million (2005)[2]
Operating income	US$732.6 million (2005)[2] (-1.0% operating margin [1])
Net income	US$372.6 million (2005)[2] (0.2% profit margin [1])
Employees	5,006 (2006) [1]
Slogan	Software for the Open Enterprise
Website	www.novell.com

Novell was also the name of a road bicycle racing team.

Novell, Inc. NASDAQ: NOVL (Big Red) is an American high-technology corporation specializing in network operating systems such as Novell NetWare and Linux, secure identity management products, and application integration and collaboration solutions. Together with WordPerfect, Novell was instrumental in making the Utah Valley a focus for high-technology software development. Today this area has many small companies whose employees have previously worked at Novell. As per a recent ranking, Novell is the 22nd largest software company in the world.^{[citation needed]}

Contents 1 History 1.1 Etymology 1.2 NetWare 1.3 Beyond NetWare 1.4 Linux for Business 1.5 Stagnancy 1.6 Your Linux is Ready 1.7 Patent Agreement with Microsoft 1.8 Acquisitions 2 Product Articles 3 See also 4 External links

[edit] History

The company began in Provo, Utah as Novell Data Systems Inc. in 1979, a hardware manufacturer producing CP/M based systems. It was co-founded by George Canova, Darin Field, and Jack Davis. Victor V. Vurpillat brought the deal to Pete Musser, Chairman of the Board, Safeguard Scientifics, Inc. who provided the seed funding. The company initially did not do well, and both Davis and Canova left the firm.

[edit] Etymology

The name for the company Novell was suggested by George Canova's wife who mistakenly thought that "Novell" meant "new" in French. (In fact, the feminine singular of "new" in French is "nouvelle").

[edit] NetWare

In January 1983, the company's name was shortened to Novell Inc., and Raymond Noorda became the head of the firm. Also in 1983, the company introduced its most significant product, the multi-platform network operating system (NOS), Novell NetWare.

Novell based its network protocol on XNS, and created its own standards from IDP and SPP, which it named IPX (Internetwork Packet eXchange) and SPX (Sequenced Packet eXchange). File and print services ran on the NetWare Core Protocol (NCP) over IPX, as did Routing Information Protocol (RIP) and Service Advertising Protocol (SAP). NetWare uses Novell DOS (formerly DR-DOS) as a boot loader. Novell DOS is similar to MS-DOS and IBM PC-DOS, but no extra license for DOS is required; this came from the acquisition of Digital Research in 1991.

Novell did extremely well throughout the 1980s, acting aggressively to increase the market initially by selling the expensive ethernet cards at cost; by 1990, Novell had an almost monopolistic position in NOS for any business requiring a network.

With this market leadership, Novell began to acquire and build services on top of its NetWare operating platform. These services extended NetWare's capabilities with such products as NetWare for SAA, Novell Multi-Protocol Router, GroupWise and BorderManager.

[edit] Beyond NetWare

However, Novell was also diversifying unwisely, moving away from its smaller users to target large corporations, under-investing in research and not improving the product administration tools (the temporary saving grace being that their products typically needed little "tweaking" - they just ran).

In 1993, the company bought Unix System Laboratories from AT&T, giving them rights to the Unix operating system, apparently in an attempt to strike at Microsoft. In 1994 Novell bought WordPerfect, as well as the Quattro Pro product from Borland. These acquisitions did not last: Novell assigned portions of their Unix business to the Santa Cruz Operation in 1995 (the extent of assets assigned is currently in dispute between Novell and The SCO Group, Santa Cruz's successor in interest) (see: SCO v. Novell), WordPerfect and Quattro Pro were sold together to Corel in 1996. DR was also sold to Caldera Systems in 1996.

As Novell's performance faded in the face of new competition, Noorda was pushed out in 1994, and he was followed by several CEOs who were as ineffective as they were temporary. Novell's only major innovation from this period was Novell Directory Services (NDS), now known as eDirectory, introduced with NetWare v4.0. eDirectory replaced the old Bindery server and user management technology employed by NetWare v3.x and earlier.

In 1996, the company began a belated move into internet-enabled products, ditching reliance on the proprietary IPX protocol in favor of a native TCP/IP stack. The move was accelerated when Eric Schmidt became CEO in 1997. The result was NetWare v5.0, released in October of 1998, which leveraged and built upon eDirectory and introduced new functions, such as Novell Cluster Services (NCS, a replacement for SFT-III) and Novell Storage Services (NSS), a replacement for the Traditional/FAT filesystem used by earlier versions of NetWare. While NetWare v5.0 introduced native TCP/IP support into the NOS, IPX was still supported, allowing for smooth transitions between environments and avoiding the "forklift upgrades" frequently required by competing environments. Similarly, the Traditional/FAT filesystem remained a supported filesystem option.

However, by now, Novell had mis-spent its dominant market position, and was continually being out-marketed by Microsoft, which gained access to corporate data centres by bypassing technical staff and selling directly to corporate executives. With falling revenues, the company pushed hard at net services and platform interoperability. Products such as eDirectory and GroupWise were made multi-platform.

In July 2001, Novell acquired the consulting company Cambridge Technology Partners, to expand offerings into services. Novell felt that the ability to offer solutions (a combination of software and services) was key to satisfying customer demand. This change was strongly resisted within the firm's software development culture as well as the finance organization which recommended against the merger. The CEO of CTP, Jack Messman, engineered the merger using his position as a board member of Novell since its inception. He soon became CEO of Novell as well.

In July 2002, Novell acquired SilverStream Software, a leader in Web services-oriented application development, but a laggard in the marketplace. The business area called Novell exteNd contains XML and Web Service tools based on J2EE.

[edit] Linux for Business

In August 2003, Novell acquired Ximian, a developer of open source Linux applications (Evolution, Red Carpet and Mono). This acquisition signalled Novell's plans to move its collective product set onto a Linux kernel.

In November 2003, Novell acquired SUSE, a developer of a leading Linux distribution, which lead to a major shift of power in Linux distributions. IBM also began to distribute Linux, and invested $50 million to show support of the SUSE acquisition. Within the openSUSE project, Novell continues to develop SUSE Linux as base for its business products. SUSE Linux 10.1 is available as Open Source only-Version (OSS Edition), which is freely downloadable and not a limited evaluation product. It is also available as boxed retail product with formal support.

In the summer of 2003, Novell released "Novell eNterprise Linux Services" (NNLS), which ported some of the services traditionally associated with NetWare to SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server (SLES) version 8.

In November 2004, Novell released the Linux-based enterprise desktop Novell Linux Desktop v9. This product was based on Ximian Desktop and SUSE Linux Professional 9.1. This was Novell's first attempt to get into the enterprise desktop market.

The successor product to NetWare, Open Enterprise Server, was released in March of 2005. OES offers all the services previously hosted by NetWare v6.5, and added the choice of delivering those services using either a NetWare v6.5 or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server v9 kernel. The release was aimed to persuade NetWare customers to move to Linux.

[edit] Stagnancy

From 2003 through 2005 Novell released a slew of products across its portfolio, with the intention of arresting falling market share and to move away from dependencies on other Novell products, but the launches were not as successful as Novell had hoped for. In an effort to cut costs, Novell announced a round of layoffs in late 2005. While revenue from its Linux business continued to grow, the growth was not fast enough to contain the fall in NetWare revenue. This meant that while the company's revenue was not falling rapidly, it was not growing either. Lack of clear direction and management ineptitude meant that Novell took longer than expected to complete its restructuring.

In June 2006, chief executive Jack Messman and chief finance officer Joseph Tibbetts were fired, with Ronald Hovsepian, Novell's president and chief operating officer, appointed chief executive, and Dana Russell, vice-president of finance and corporate controller, appointed interim CFO.

In May 2006, Novell sold its consulting subsidiary Celerant Consulting to focus on its four core products portfolios: Platform Services, Secure Identity Management, Resource Management and Workgroup solutions. In April 2006, it acquired e-Security, Inc., a leading provider in the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) space.

[edit] Your Linux is Ready

In August 2006 Novell released the SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 (SLE 10) series of products. SUSE Linux Enterprise server was the first enterprise class Linux server to offer virtualization based on the Xen hypervisor. SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (Popularly known as SLED) featured a new user friendly GUI and XGL based 3D display capabilities. The release of SLE 10 was marketed with the phrase 'Your Linux is Ready', meant to convey that Novell's Linux offerings were ready for the enterprise. In late September 2006 Novell announced a real time version of SLES called SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time (SLERT) based on technology from Concurrent Computer Corporation.

The future growth of Novell is largely dependent on how successful the SLE 10 products are in the market place.

[edit] Patent Agreement with Microsoft

On November 2, 2006, Novell and Microsoft announced a joint patent agreement to cover their respective products [1] [2].

Initial reaction from members of the FOSS community was mostly critical, with expressions of concern that Novell had “sold out” and of doubt that the GPL would allow distribution of code under this exclusive agreement [3] [4] [5].

In a letter to the FOSS development community on November 9, Bradley M. Kuhn, CTO of the Software Freedom Law Center described the agreement as “worse than useless” [6]. In a separate development the chairman of the SFLC, Eben Moglen, reported that Novell had offered cooperation with the SFLC to permit a confidential audit to determine the compliance of the agreement with the GPL (version 2) [7].

On November 12 the Samba team expressed strong disapproval of Novell's announcements on November 2 and asked Novell to reconsider [8]. The Samba team includes an employee of Novell, Jeremy Allison, who confirmed in a comment on Slashdot that the statement was agreed on by all members of the team [9].

[edit] Acquisitions

• Digital Research - 1991
• Unix System Laboratories - 1993
• WordPerfect & Quattro Pro (Borland) - 1994
• Cambridge Technology Partners - 2001
• SilverStream Software - 2002
• Ximian - 2003
• SUSE - 2003
• Salmon - 2004
• Tally Systems - 2005
• Immunix - 2005
• e-Security, Inc - 2006

[edit] Product Articles

• Novell Evolution
• NetWare
• Open Enterprise Server
• GroupWise
• NetMail
• Novell eDirectory
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server

[edit] See also

• SUSE Linux
• OpenSUSE
• SCO v. Novell
• Novell Open Audio

[edit] External links

• Official website
• Yahoo! - Novell, Inc. Company Profile
• Novell Forge - Open Source project hosting sponsored by Novell
• Novell Open Audio - official podcast for the Novell technical community
• Cool Solutions - tips & tricks, guides, tools and other resources submitted by the Novell community
• Novell Users International
• abeNd.org - Novell News for IT Professionals
• Provo Utah - Official City Site
• Salmon Ltd.
• [10] - Surfing a High Tech Wave: A story of Novell's Early Years 1980-90
• Summary of the press conference on 2/11/06 announcing the patent agreement between Novell and Microsoft