Faced with the reality that its cross-platform directory plans have met with tepid industry interest, Novell, Inc. is looking for a more expeditious way to pull Unix servers and mainframe systems into the NetWare fold.
The company is working on a set of Novell Directory Services (NDS) authentication modules that will let users sign on to a network once and tap into data and applications on NetWare, Unix and mainframe systems.
The plan represents an about-face for Novell, which has a half-dozen partnerships with the likes of Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM and Sun Microsystems, Inc. under which these firms were to port NDS to run natively on their respective operating systems.
While Novell intends to continue to support these partnerships, officials appointed by turn-around CEO Eric Schmidt said they have misgivings about this old approach.
"I can spend all of my resources [trying to get partners to port] NDS to these garden flavor varieties of Unix, but that would be a waste of time," said Chris Stone, Novell vice president of strategy.
"Yes, I guess you would have to say that [this approach] didn't work. We threw a party and not many people came," said A. J. Dennis, a Novell corporate strategist under John Slitz, newly appointed Novell marketing head.
HP and The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. are the only licensees that currently bundle NDS with their Unix offerings. Despite licensing the NDS code last July, IBM is not expected to ship NDS on either AIX or OS/390 until later this year.
Fujitsu, Ltd. and Sun also have licensed the directory code but have not committed to delivery dates. In fact, industry analysts doubt Sun ever will ship NDS for Solaris, because the company recently shipped its own directory service.
"The commitment of these third parties to push NDS is just not there," said Neil MacDonald, an analyst with Gartner Group, Inc., in Stamford, Conn. "If there was real support behind these deals, you would have seen both product and corporate deployment by now."
But despite the lack of movement from Novell's partners, Stone said users still want a simple way to weave Unix boxes into their Novell nets.
In all likelihood, Novell will build and market these NDS authentication modules on its own. But officials would not say if these modules would be sold as stand-alone products or be rolled into future versions of NetWare or NDS. They would not give a time frame for delivery.
Kansas City, Mo.-based Hallmark, Inc. said it would be interested in single sign-on capability for its 60 NetWare 4.X network and various Unix application servers. But Hallmark was put off by the original vision because the cardmaker uses too many flavors of Unix, said technical analyst Dan Blevins. "Managing all of those separate NDS host machines would have been too complicated."
Novell's authentication-module approach has worked in the past, said Michael Simpson, director of product marketing for Novell's Network Services Division. Novell shipped a redirection module for Windows NT servers in early 1997 as part of a two-phase NT and NDS integration plan. This module, called Novell Administrator for NT, gave customers single sign-on capability and centralized user account administration for mixed NT and NetWare nets.
It wasn't until Novell released NDS for NT last December that the directory ran natively on top of the operating system.
"No, you don't need native NDS support for single sign-on. But there still is some value in having it there," said Simpson.
Specifically, native NDS is useful in remote offices where companies don't want to deploy multiple operating systems and for running new cross-platform, directory-enabled applications.
