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Novell, Inc. , nicknamed the "Big Red" is an American software 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.{{fact}}
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. The Safeguard board then ordered Musser to shut Novell down. Musser contacted two Safeguard investors and investment bankers, Barry Rubenstein and Fred Dolin, who guaranteed to raise the necessary funds to continue the business as a software company. They, along with Jack Messman, interviewed and hired Ray Norda. The required funding was accomplished through a rights offering to Safeguard shareholders, managed by the Cleveland brokerage house Prescott, Ball and Turbin and guaranteed by Rubenstein and Dolin.
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").
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.
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 October of 2000, Novell released a new product, dubbed DirXML, which was designed to synchronize data, often user information, between disparate directory and database systems. This product leveraged the speed and functionality of eDirectory to store information, and would later become the Novell Identity Manager product and form the foundation of a core product set within Novell.
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.
Linux for Business
In August 2003, Novell acquired Ximian, a developer of open source Linux applications (Evolution, Red Carpet and Mono). This acquisition signaled 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.
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.
Recent Developments
In April 2006, Novell acquired e-Security, Inc., a leading provider in the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) space and developer of the Sentinel Security Event Manager. In May 2006, it sold its consulting subsidiary Celerant Consulting to focus on its five core products portfolios: Data Center, Security and Identity Management, Resource Management, Desktop Solutions (based on SuSE Linux) and Workgroup solutions.
The Data Center portfolio is based around the Linux platform SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), with accompanying virtualization, clustering, and security technologies.
The Desktop portfolio is similarly based around SuSE Linux, in the form of SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED), along with some customized versions for specific industries.
The Workgroup portfolio provides a cross-platform and mixed-source suite of applications for office productivity such as Open Enterprise Server, GroupWise, OpenOffice, and Novell Storage Manager.
The Security and Identity Management portfolio provides a suite of products that leverage identity information stored and managed with Novell Identity Manager to manage access to networks, systems, and information. Products include:
* Novell Access Manager - provides identity-based access to internal resources from outside, including web applications, SSLVPN applications, and so forth. Also includes federation based on Liberty and SAML.
* Novell BorderManager - Manages access to external websites from inside the corporate network based on identities and policies.
* Novell Sentinel - A Security Event Manager that provides event collection, automated correlation, analysis, and reporting - will soon be fully integrated with Identity Manager and other IDM solutions to provide visibility into user activities.
The Resource Management portfolio is primarily based around the ZENworks toolset, which provides application and patch management for servers, desktops, and handheld devices and asset management for Windows and Linux.
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.
Patent Agreement with Microsoft
On November 2 2006, Novell and Microsoft announced a joint patent agreement to cover their respective products [http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/nov06/11-02MSNovellPR.mspx] [http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/steve/2006/11-02NovellInterop.mspx]. They also promised to work more closely together, in order to improve their software's ability to work with other software, setting up a joint research facility to do this. Both companies hope this will lead to better compatibility between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org and better virtualization techniques.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said of the deal, "This set of agreements will really help bridge the divide between open-source and proprietary source software." [http://news.com.com/Microsoft+makes+Linux+pact+with+Novell/2100-1016_3-6132119.html?tag=nefd.lede]
Initial reaction from members of the FOSS community over the patent protection was mostly critical, with expressions of concern that Novell had “sold out” and of doubt that the GPL would allow distribution of code, including the Linux kernel, under this exclusive agreement [http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20061102175508403] [http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20061103073628401] [http://lwn.net/Articles/207559/].
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” [http://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/20061109a.html]. 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) [http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2168151/novells-opens-microsoft]. Richard Stallman founder of the Free Software Foundation, said in November that changes coming with the version 3 of the GPL will preclude such deals [http://www.france.fsfeurope.org/projects/gplv3/tokyo-rms-transcript#novell-ms].
On November 12, the Samba team expressed strong disapproval of Novell's announcements on November 2 and asked Novell to reconsider [http://news.samba.org/announcements/team_to_novell/]. 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 [http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=206202&cid=16817478], and later quit his job at Novell in protest [http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20061221081000710].
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
Product Articles
* Novell Evolution
* NetWare
* Open Enterprise Server
* GroupWise
* NetMail
* Novell eDirectory
* SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
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