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| In My Opinion....... Novell Out of the Woods? Networking is a funny old game � a game of two halves. Half of us loathe Microsoft whilst the other half merely detests them. No, no, no, no, no � that�s not fair. Cheap shot. I�m sorry. I�m actually writing this using Word 2000 running on a machine hosting Windows 2000 Professional Beta 3, connected to a Windows 2000 Beta 3 file server, and so far it hasn�t killed me. No, what I�m talking about is that for much of the first half of the game, Microsoft was nowhere to be seen. Banyan was leading the NOS field as far as the big corporates were concerned since it had an excellent product with a true directory service. Novell, meanwhile, captured all the market share since it was less expensive and much easier to use. Then came half time, and Novell went to sleep, whilst Microsoft put its marketing machine into top gear, and with good effect. Banyan has all but disappeared up its own back end and re-emerged as a Microsoft services company of all things, with significant investment from Microsoft itself. Alas, Banyan Vines � an excellent product � appears to be no more. For a while there it looked as if Novell was going the same way, too. If ever there was an example of a company resting firmly on its laurels, Novell was it. Couple that with some disastrous strategic decisions (remember DR DOS, UnixWare and WordPerfect?) and marketing so low key as to be invisible, and you had a recipe for corporate suicide. Attending this year�s BrainShare conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, it quickly became apparent that the bad old days are all but forgotten � Novell has returned to its roots and is once again on the up and up. Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO, points out that "it took two and a half years for sales of NetWare 4 to outstrip those of NetWare 3". Sales of NetWare 5, however, are already outstripping those of NetWare 4 just six months after its launch. "This is the year", states Schmidt, "that Novell regains its market leadership as we deploy systems for more than just file and print". NetWare 5 itself undergoes another face lift later this year in the form of an update code-named "Six Pack". Six Pack brings a significant increase in performance and scalability thanks to the new Multi Processing Kernel (MPK) which supports up to 32 processors and scales extremely well when adding processors (depending on the application). All the core networking services � the file system, Java, and so on � have also been multi-processor enabled to further enhance performance. Along with Six Pack comes the latest and greatest release of Novell Directory Services - NDS V8. Now a native LDAP V3 directory, the new NDS has been re-architected to significantly improve scalability and performance. At BrainShare it was demonstrated with over a billion objects in the directory, and with lightning fast response to LDAP searches. This would allow NDS to be used as the main directory service for the Internet � a staggering thought. With versions running on NetWare, NT (natively), Unix, and OS/390, and plans to port to Linux even, Novell now has a strong story to present to both corporates and ISPs. At the other end of the scale to NDS is the concept of the �personal directory�, called digitalme. This uses an electronic business card model to provide a single store for all your Internet identities, allowing you to choose which information you make public. Using these cards allows rapid exchange of personal information between remote users, as well as streamlining the process of logging on to and using the various "personalised" Web sites. Another milestone for Novell is the brand new Internet Caching System. This takes the Web caching technology from Border Manager and couples it with a stripped down NetWare kernel and a high performance object file store designed specifically for caching operations. The result is a self contained piece of software � not reliant on NetWare as a platform � that can be licensed to hardware vendors to create a Web caching appliance. Dell and Compaq are the first to take it up, and this sort of licensing deal could be the start of a whole new business model for Novell. Who is to say we will not shortly see stand alone Novell mail servers and directory servers?
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