Conference Report: Novell Brainshare

James Harding reports from Novell's Brainshare conference, held in Salt Lake City, Utah, where collaboration was the order of the day

Dynamic duos in Brainshare unity

The prospect of a joint venture between Novell and Sun was fuelled last week when the networking giant?s chairman Eric Schmidt admitted that the two companies were in talks about close collaboration.

Speaking at Novell?s Brainshare conference in Utah ? his first public appearance with Novell, the company he will join on 7 April ? Schmidt said the company was in close collaboration with Sun, but he refused to discuss the possibility of a merger or joint venture between them.

?We won?t comment on that and we never will, but we will develop our collaborations. Networking is a collaboration-intensive world. I have all the home phone numbers of everybody at Sun,? he said.

The conference revealed evidence of the companies? work together, when Novell announced that it had licensed Project Studio ? an interactive programming tool based on Visual Java ? from Sun.

The company confirmed that Project Studio will soon be bundled with its own Intranetware.

Meanwhile, Novell president Joe Marengi took the opportunity to affirm his commitment to the networking giant, despite increased speculation that he would leave when Schmidt is installed next month.

The two men who, in conjunction with vice chairman John Young, sit at the company?s helm, are expected to give each other a firm vote of confidence.

Schmidt insisted that Marengi and Young were contributing factors in his decision to take the job. ?Joe will advise me. I have weaknesses where he has strengths,? he said.

Marengi commented: ?Schmidt was my first choice as CEO. We are different ? he will be Batman and I will be Robin.?

The roles of the three men have not yet been defined, but Schmidt said that all three needed to work together to improve Novell?s weak marketing and capitalise on its strong customer and reseller base.

Novell acquires wisdom from Wordperfect farce

Novell has vowed that it will not repeat the mistake it made with Wordperfect, and will only acquire firms that relate to its core technology of networking.

The networking giant bought Wordperfect in 1994, but sold the operation to Canadian-based developer Corel one year later because it was unable to break Microsoft?s stranglehold on the desktop.

Learning the lessons of the disastrous acquisition and subsequent sale of Wordperfect, company president Joe Marengi conceded that Novell had made expensive mistakes by trying to cover too many areas in the software market.

?We will focus on three product categories: server operating systems, network services and collaboration. We are not going to acquire companies in a completely different area like we have in the past,? he said.

The key to Novell?s strategy is Intranetware ? the company plans an update to its flagship package by the end of 1997. The next version of Intranetware is codenamed Moab and will include Java capabilities, memory protection, a multiprocessor kernel, and support for Winsock, Workstation Manager and TCP/IP.

Novell also announced it will give away Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service for Novell Directory Services (Radius for NDS), which makes it easier for customers to access networks from anywhere with a single sign-in procedure.

Denice Gibson, senior vice president of Novell?s internet products division, said the company is offering Radius for NDS free to try to pull the industry closer to Novell?s vision of networks and standards.

The firm plans to incorporate a set of technologies, currently under development, into its products. These include advanced clustering of multiple processors and 64-bit support for the Intel Merced processor.

Vendor sets sights on Euro growth in run up to 2000

Novell is placing greater efforts on its European business as the company plans to grow its non-US revenue from 49 per cent to over 60 per cent of its total business.

Speaking at the Brainshare User conference held in Salt Lake City, Novell president Joe Marengi said that one of the three ways the company will grow during the rest of the decade is by concentrating its efforts on growing its business outside the US.

?We will use the internationalisation of our business ? our goal is to achieve over 60 per cent of revenue outside the US by the year 2000,? he claimed.

Marengi added that Novell?s US business is stable, and the company sees a lot of opportunity in developing markets. He said that although Novell is hoping for increases in its European revenue, it expects faster growth in the Asia Pacific region.

The other two key factors in the networking giant?s growth strategy relate to beefing up the existing product line through R&D, and investment in, or acquisition of, other network related companies, according to Marengi.

Meanwhile, Novell and Netscape?s UK channel partners were left in the dark again this week as they prepared themselves for a major shake-up as a result of the joint venture between the two companies setting up Novonyx.

Two weeks ago Novell and Netscape joined forces to create an independent operation that would sell Novell?s Suitespot server family on Intranetware platforms (PC Dealer, 26 March).

But James Symmington, Netscape channel manager, claimed that he did not know how the channel was likely to be structured. He would neither confirm nor deny whether any distribution partners or resellers would lose their existing status.

Both Novell and Netscape US refused to comment.

Visigenic Orb holds key to Intranetware strategy

Visigenic Software?s object request broker (Orb) will be an integral part of Novell?s flagship Intranetware after the two companies concluded a deal last week.

The agreement finally ended speculation that Novell would buy an Orb ? which had been expected to come from ICL ? and brings it closer to its latest partner Oracle, which also licenses the Visigenic product.

Novell is also preparing to make Open Market?s e-commerce package its primary Netware loadable module (NLM) in this area.

The Visigenic deal, which covers Java and C++ versions of the Visibroker Orb, allows Novell developers to support the Object Management Group?s Corba and IIOP specifications. The partners have jointly funded a research laboratory and claim the move gives developers open tools for building network applications.

Novell also revealed that its e-commerce NLM, based on Open Market?s Transact, is close to a formal launch and is being beta tested.

The networking giant also plans to ship a product to provide security, management and performance at the border between corporate networks and the internet.

Border Services aims to address customers? needs by offering access management, access control and lower costs for administering networks that allow internet access.