Novell's CEO Eric Schmidt says within a month or two he will replace two key executives who suddenly left the company. On the technology front, Novell will pursue a strategy to make NDS the overarching directory service for enterprises and that NDS will effectively share information with other directories.
In a public interview at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo conference in Orlando this week, Schmidt said he would name replacements for former Novell CTO Christopher Stone and senior vice president of marketing John Slitz. The company isn't hurting as much as it might have because both men built strong teams that remain in place. "The company has a lot of management depth now," Schmidt says.
As one might expect, the questions quickly turned to Microsoft. Asked how he sees NDS competing with Microsoft's Active Directory, Schmidt argued that they serve different purposes.
He makes a peace between Active Directory and NDS-sort of. "You need an enterprisewide directory and Active Directory is not suited to it. NDS can do it," Schmidt says. Customers will buy Active Directory for use in small workgroups, and NDS will be used as the enterprise-wide directory service. "We will co-populate and that will be good for everybody," Schmidt says. "Our core strategy is to deploy integrated directories."
Schmidt says Novell has had NDS up and running on Windows NT and the most recent beta release of Windows 2000. He also says a bidirectional directory synchronization platform is planned. "We have a commitment: we will work with whatever directory architectures there are," he says. Next month, the company plans to introduce NDS for UNIX and Solaris.
Schmidt was asked why customers have to pay twice for NDS if they buy it to go with NetWare as well as NT, for example. He said next month Novell would ship NDS with support for multiple platforms in one package rather than selling a version for NetWare and a separate version for NT. "NDS won't be free and there won't be completely uniform pricing," he says.
Asked how he deals with customers who consider Microsoft's Active Directory as a safer choice than NDS, Schmidt professed disbelief, especially since Active Directory has yet to ship. "The safest choice is a product that doesn't exist? We are in Disney World, but...," he says.
Novell's strategy for competing with NT is to focus on enterprises that need a reliable platform, but not to go out of its way to broaden its appeal with expensive mass marketing. "We will never have the marketing and the broad retail presence Microsoft has. We are specialists and our customers tend to know that. It actually matters that our stuff stays up," he says with a hint of sarcasm.
However, Novell is making an attempt to draw consumers with its Digital Me product, a free Web service for Internet users who want to limit the amount of information they reveal about themselves as they buy things over the 'Net.
Novell's Digital Me lets people create directory profiles and use these to access the Internet. That lets them present the information they want to the Internet via a proxy. Otherwise, Web sites can set cookies on to draw more information than the user might want to part with Schmidt says. "Web sites are visiting you. You get to decide what information you will keep that you don't give to other sites," he says.
Digital Me is free, and e-business sites will pay Novell for applications written to Digital Me, Schmidt says.
The strategy is to make Digital Me ubiquitous so big sites will want to take advantage of it, he says.
Schmidt says unlike Digital Me, Novell cannot afford to give away NDS. But he says Novell is working on new pricing for NDS and tying it to applications that Novell will also sell. But he says it is a tricky balance because lowering the price of NDS will raise prices of something else.
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