Will v6.5 bring success to NetWare again?

Can NetWare 6.5 revive the fortunes of Novell’s platform which has lost market share in the last few years? Forecasts are always fickle, but Shipra Arora finds 6.5 has plenty going for it

Customers want better choice, they don’t want to be locked into either specific operating system platforms or hardware-specific solutions, says John Phillips

According to IDC, Novell slipped on a worldwide basis from providing 19 percent of new licenses shipped in 1999 to 11 percent in 2001, with numbers expected to follow a similar trend in 2002. In comparison, from 1999 to 2001, rival Microsoft increased its market share from 37 percent to 49 percent. Alok Shende, industry manager, technology practice, Frost & Sullivan, says that while NetWare acquired significant traction in the enterprise networking space in the late eighties and nineties, it has been on the decline for the past few years. Novell disagrees, and feels this fall is due to the manner in which market share is measured in the server environment—in terms of the number of servers shipped—which it says skews market figures to NetWare’s disadvantage.

Nevertheless, amid rumours that the company was going to phase out the platform, Novell has launched the latest version of NetWare—NetWare 6.5—and asserted that NetWare is here to stay. But 6.5 is much more than an affirmation of the company’s seriousness about the platform. It actually holds the key to Novell’s fortunes since the company is placing heavy bets on this latest version to bring back customers and developers who, it admits, have strayed away from NetWare in the last few years. “There have been some customers (earlier) migrating away, but what we are seeing now with 6.5 is significant interest from them,” says John Phillips, corporate technology strategist, Novell Asia Pacific. More importantly, the uptake of NetWare 6.5 will determine whether Novell’s NetWare 7, slated to be released in the next two years, will find acceptance or not.

By deciding to piggyback on Linux, once a major competitor, Novell is holding enough bait for its prospective as well as ex-customers to bite. The company will provide a large percentage of what’s in NetWare 6.5 on the Linux kernel. NetWare 6.5 and Nterprise Linux Services will move in a parallel mode before they finally reach NetWare 7, when the complete Novell services set will run on both the NetWare and Linux kernels. This will give customers the choice of NetWare or Linux as a kernel, while still maintaining NetWare services. With this, Novell has definitely generated interest in moving to NetWare. According to Phillips, the reason why customers are looking at 6.5 and Novell again as a solutions provider is because it allows customers to choose the operating system they want to use.

The cost of losing

NetWare accounts for around $650 million (60 percent) of Novell’s $1.134 billion global revenue during 2002. According to Ashit Panjwani, national manager for alliances and marketing, Onward Novell Software India, the share of NetWare in Novell’s overall business in the Indian market is also slightly on the higher side. Thus, with a significant chunk of business coming from NetWare, Novell cannot afford to lose out on it.

Competition

Though it has lessened competition from Linux, the company will still have to contend with Windows, which will be a tough call. Novell is expecting a good chunk of new business to come from existing customers who are recognising the additional value in migrating their environments to 6.5. It also expects transitions from customers running other operating systems, especially a proprietary operating system like Windows. “At the end of the day customers want better choice. They don’t want to be locked into either specific operating system platforms or hardware-specific solutions,” explains Phillips. This, he feels, will drive 6.5 against the competition.

Easier said than done. Shende points out that there are two dominant trends in the network OS market that are affecting NetWare. The first relates to the OS with players themselves having adopted network OS functionality in the OS. Both the Windows and Linux platforms have a powerful networking OS component. This has brought down the need to deploy a separate networking OS. The second is the wider adoption of network OS that comes from vendors who supply network gear. For instance, Internet Operating System (IOS) from Cisco has been able to acquire a greater traction simply because it comes bundled with their routers. And while IOS had its first set of penetration among data carriers, with the adoption of the Internet by enterprises there is powerful adoption in this space as well.

Attracting developers

The uptake of 6.5 will depend on the availability of applications on the platform. Pointing to NetWare’s success in the banking vertical in India, Panjwani says that besides factors like scalability, reliability and security, one of the major spurs for growth is the number of applications that are available to Indian developers. Considering this, the developer community figures quite prominently in Novell’s strategy. The company sees developers as a major means to help them develop applications on 6.5. Some of the key applications Novell is targeting are anti-virus software, a complete healthcare system, banking and high-end ERP software.

According to Phillips, though Novell was already targeting developers with NetWare’s previous versions, the focus on this segment will get even more enhanced with 6.5 owing to the open-source features. The developer focus can prove to be an intelligent strategy for Novell with its two benefits: getting more developers as its customers for 6.5, and being able to target new customers through these developers. Though the current proportion of the company’s NetWare business coming from the developer side is not available, it is believed that developer-customers are likely to increase with this latest version.

Novell believes that 6.5 gives it an edge because of the open-source technologies it has embraced. This is something which, Panjwani feels, appeals to the entire developer community. The company has made MySQL, Apache, Tomcat, PHP and Perl a part of 6.5 in its bid to make it compelling for developers to develop their applications on 6.5.

Signs of an encouraging response from developers are becoming visible. According to Phillips, a number of developers have already embraced 6.5, and during the India launch many presented their solutions on the platform. These included developers focussing on verticals like healthcare, manufacturing and banking.

However, he insists that the sales cycle does not stop with a developer developing applications. Novell’s role will extend to handholding and helping them in terms of joint marketing activities, and involving them at launch events. This becomes significant since some developers are also reselling 6.5. “We will be working very closely with them and making sure that they are successful because that will determine the success of our product,” adds Phillips.

Open-source support

Lack of support for open-source components has been one of the biggest bottlenecks for enterprises adopting open source. Now with 6.5, if developers/customers are having trouble with, for example, the Apache Web server or Tomcat on NetWare, they can get support through Novell, something which was not available earlier. “So by backing the community we are supporting a lot of things which were traditionally supported by the open-source community using the hundreds of resources that nobody directly focused on,” explains Phillips.

Apart from open-source, another major plus-point of 6.5 over its predecessor is the virtual office component. A virtual office brings together file, print and messaging, so collaboration services and even logging-in to the entire office environment through a browser from anywhere on the Internet is possible. 6.5 has been engineered to address two areas—making it easier and more cost-effective for administrators, and making it more functional and available to users.

With 6.5 Novell has also made enhancements in the two major areas of Web services and business continuity. On the Web services front the company has made an addition in terms of porting the J2EE Web application server on to NetWare. The Extend application server is bundled with 6.5, and comes with Novell’s acquisition of Silver Stream. The Web services pillar with 6.5 means that customers get a fully operational J2EE Web application server. This provides the ability to run any application which has been developed on a J2EE application server without any problem. At the same time it also gives the customer Tomcat, which gives them the choice of the application server they want to use to develop their applications. What this means for 6.5 customers is that they do not have to go out and buy a separate Web application server, so they save money.

On the business continuity front, while 6.5 is not extending past 32 nodes at this stage, it has enhanced the functionality of clusters. Since implementing a fully functional SAN is an expensive proposition, 6.5 will support the iSCSI standard. With this customers can have their 6.5 box and pretend to be a SAN to everybody else. This will make it a lot cheaper and feasible for the small customer to implement a SAN. Novell has also implemented some new technologies for back-up called ‘Snapshot’ back-up. Across the SAN customers can configure the server to take snapshots, say every 30 minutes or every hour. It will take a snapshot of changed files and then back them up offline. Further, because of the way 6.5 is licensed by users as opposed to traditional connections, it will allow customers to deploy as many servers as they want. This means that they can deploy as many two-node clusters as they want for the price of user licenses without any additional cost.

Novell presently has around 100 direct channel partners in India. Though it has not expanded this network for the launch of NetWare 6.5, it may do so as demand picks up.

shipra@expresscomputeronline.com