Novell

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Novell, Inc.
Company typePublic (NASDAQ: NOVL)
IndustrySoftware
FoundedProvo, Utah (1983)
HeadquartersWaltham, Massachusetts, USA
Key people
Jack Messman, Chairman and CEO
Ron Hovsepian, COO and President
Bill Hewitt, Senior Vice President, CMO
Joseph S. Tibbetts, Jr., Senior Vice President, CFO
ProductsNovell eDirectory
Novell Open Enterprise Server
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Novell NetWare
SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop
Novell GroupWise
Novell ZENworks
Novell Identity Manager
Novell iChain
Novell exteNd
Revenue$1.166 billion USD (2004)
Number of employees
~6000 (2005)
Websitewww.novell.com
Novell was also the name of a road bicycle racing team.

Novell, Inc. Template:NasdaqNM (Big Red) is an American high-technology 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.

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.

Etymology

The name for the company Novell was suggested by George Canova's wife who mistakenly thought that "Novell" meant "new" in French.

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). To accompany this, Novell touted Novell DOS (formerly DR-DOS), similar to MS-DOS; this came from the acquisition of Digital Research in 1991. Early versions of NetWare were somewhat notorious for presenting the administrator with an ABEND.

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, underinvesting in research and leaving their key product opaque and difficult to control and administer. 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: 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 in around 1996 the company began a belated move into internet-enabled products, ditching the proprietary network protocol in favor of native IP. The move was accelerated when Eric Schmidt became CEO in 1997, and the result was NetWare 5 and the associated directory services through Novell Directory Services. With falling revenues, the company pushed hard at net services and platform interoperability.

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 is significant, because Novell now plans to move its NetWare product to the Linux kernel by the time of its next release.


In summer 2003, Novell released "Novell Nterprise Linux Services", expanding its NetWare services to SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 8.

In July 2004, Novell acquired Salmon, a UK-based IT consultancy firm, in order to strengthen its consultancy delivery capabilities in Europe and the UK.

In November 2004, Novell released the enterprise desktop Novell Linux Desktop 9 based on SUSE Linux Professional 9.1.

In March 2005, Novell released the "Open Enterprise Server" which offers all services from NetWare 6.5 on either a NetWare or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 kernel.

In September 2005, Novell released "ZENworks 7" which offers automated identity-driven resource management to deploy, manage and maintain IT resources in diverse IT environments.

In October 2005, Novell announced the availability of Novell eDirectory 8.8

See also

External links

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