Novell's Alliances: Pact Solid

As many a politician knows, your enemy?s enemy can be a valuable friend, but can such partnerships really work in the IT industry? Bobby Pickering finds out

Novell has unveiled a string of marketing and technology alliances with key intranet and Java players in the past month ? Oracle, Netscape, Sun and HP have all announced agreements with the company.

According to Novell UK MD Tom Schuster, this is just the tip of the iceberg. At a Brainshare briefing in London recently he said: ?There will be more to come. This partnership with competitors approach helped establish us in the network market. We intend to follow that approach in the intranet market. We recognise we will have to partner to get growth in this market.?

He went on to explain Novell?s view that the development of intranets is making proprietary technologies obsolete and establishing open standards in network computing.

?The intranet has radically changed the way companies view networks. They are moving from proprietary standards to the open standards used on the internet, and are changing from focusing on a proprietary network technology from one supplier to the adoption of common platforms.?

Novell has decided that it wants to play a crucial role in all this by providing one essential ingredient: directory services ? specifically Novell Directory Services (NDS) ? which will allow intranets to use a single self-replicating directory on a global basis. At least, if NDS is adopted widely and becomes a de facto internet open standard. And that?s still a big if, although Novell would like us to believe that it has already achieved that goal.

?With these alliances, NDS is established as the open standard for the directory,? claimed Schuster in a rather flamboyant display of hyperbole. ?NDS is the basic single point where everything is defined. And when Wolf Mountain [Novell?s forthcoming clustering technology] is added, you?ll have a universal file system that is global and highly scalable.?

Yet while most people see the need for a directory services standard to be established for intranet development, the fact remains that NDS is not being widely adopted, even though at this stage, Novell is offering it royalty free. Of the three most important announcements recently, NDS was openly endorsed in only one:

• Oracle has given NDS the biggest boost of all, by setting up a Novell products division and working on the co-development of network computer technologies that they hope will move Intranetware?s 60 per cent share of the installed network market base and Oracle?s 40 per cent of the database market into their joint efforts.
• Novell president Joe Marengi said: ?Through this partnership, Intranetware and Oracle?s network computing architecture move forward to support networked applications tied together by NDS. This also helps establish NDS as the standard directory service for internet and intranet applications.?
• It may be the case that it ?helps? it along, but the move certainly doesn?t establish NDS as a standard.
• Netscape?s decision to form a marketing alliance with Novell grabbed the most headlines because it seemed to have the most solid foundations ? the formation of a company called Novonyx, based in Utah. On closer inspection, however, this is a joint marketing agreement, and the announcements mention nothing about NDS endorsement or widespread adoption by Netscape.
• Novell said a beta version of Netscape Enterprise Server 3 running on Intranetware and integrated with NDS would be shown at Brainshare ? something that falls well short of Netscape embracing NDS with open arms.
• The Sun alliance was also given a lot of column inches in the press, as it followed hard on the heels of the appointment of former Sun chief technology officer Eric Schmidt as Novell?s chairman. But this agreement also failed to provide proof of Sun?s acceptance of NDS as the new open standard for directory services on the internet.
• Sun and Novell will work to deliver Java APIs for Intranetware and NDS, and further advance NDS and Intranetware?s services into key enabling technologies for adding structure to Java applications, intranets and internets. At no point did Sun say NDS was part of the Java Foundation Classes, which it is co-developing with Netscape and IBM.

What this all means is that in showering us with announcement upon announcement of development alliances, Novell seems to be hoping to engineer an impression that NDS is being widely adopted and endorsed as the new open standard for directory services.

In the process, Novell must be hoping that no one notices that a key component in any effort to establish an open standard is blatantly missing from all its efforts. Where?s the standards body? The Worldwide Web consortium is the open standards body that oversees HTML and HTTP; the Object Management Group controls the common object request broker architecture (Corba); even Microsoft went out of its way to attempt to put Active X into the public domain before recoiling from the consequences at a late stage.

The waters are currently entirely muddied as to which parts of the Active X technologies have actually been placed in the public domain. Novell simply obfuscates when challenged to name a group with which it might place NDS and other Intranetware services, or even if it plans to make this essential move.

?There are two ways for standards to evolve,? says Schuster. ?In one case, three or more players get together and decide a common approach. The other scenario is where a player is in a dominant position, it gets others around it and on its side, and then opens it out.?

The problem with the second approach, as Novell is discovering, is that opening it out after receiving widespread endorsement is a bit like putting the cart before the horse. Once it has major backing, why should Novell bother to open up this hugely important technology? What guarantee does anyone have that Novell won?t change its mind. Novell refuses to talk about the fine print behind these key alliances it is negotiating, so no one knows if any such thinking is involved. But one suspects it is.

Yet looking at the situation from Novell?s perspective, why should it put its crown jewels out into the public domain without any guarantee that it is going to benefit in the long-run? The company is in a hugely unenviable catch-22 situation, and the recent alliances with its competitors are an acknowledgement of it, and an edging towards a solution that?s agreeable to all.

Another big question here is whether another open standard might emerge before NDS has time to sort itself out. Microsoft, we know, is working on its own Active Directory as part of its NT-based Active Platform for the internet and intranets. That is still a long way off ? Cairo and its associated products may not be ready to ship until late 1998. This gives Novell, and NDS, a huge time advantage which Novell and its allies could take advantage of if they come to some resolution of the current dilemma.

But Microsoft?s technology, as always, is entirely proprietary and will never be opened out. Microsoft?s view, often stated, is that its customers will benefit from the centralised control of a single company. Open standards and control of key technologies by squabbling groups of companies simply don?t work ? that is the emphatic viewpoint of Bill Gates, who is as likely to change his mind on this matter as change his sex.

It is possible that other players, say Netscape and IBM, are working on a competitive directory services solution. But why proceed if Novell is so keen to move NDS into the public domain? Schuster agrees that IBM is conspicuously absent from the line-up of allies, but says: ?Watch this space! We?re working on many things with IBM.?

So the key to Novell?s dilemma at the moment may well lie with king-maker Big Blue, as it so often has when standards have need to be established. Certainly, if Novell can swing it, there?s one hell of a prize to win. As Schuster notes: ?If we?re providing the glue that binds global intranets together, then NDS will be a key component technology, and we?ll have a tremendous future.?

This is a high-stakes game for Novell ? a matter of life and death. But what is becoming increasingly clear is that Novell seems genuinely to be inching its way towards a radical transformation. Where once it was fiercely proprietorial, it now appears to be moving into the open standards camp.

If it can achieve that conversion, it could prove to be the lifesaving move that proves how wrong MS? strategy is in the ever evolving world of networked computing. The ?amazing morphing PC? as Microsoft?s representatives call it, may not turn out to be all things to all men if the worlds of PC and NC computing establish themselves on entirely separate trajectories: one based on proprietary Wintel standards; the other based on open technologies supported by a powerful axis of companies ? Oracle, Netscape and Sun among them. Oh, and possibly Novell, if it can earn its place in that pantheon.