Later this month, at an event headlined by former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Novell will announce the rebranding of its products in four key categories.  Alan Nugent, the company's new CTO, says that effort is in line with Novell's mission to match its technical expertise with stronger marketing. He spoke with a group of Network World editors last week about where he sees Novell heading.

What's your vision for Novell?

When Novell announced OneNet [two-and-a-half] years ago, the intent was to provide a framework for the growth of the company - where we wanted to be when we grew up. It was also a message to the market that said, 'We're a company that provides products, solutions and services that allow you to have information without boundaries from any device at any time.' When the company made that announcement, it was not really able to deliver across the entire spectrum. Now we are. We've spent a fair amount of time looking at the market and trying to figure out what we needed to do to complement the OneNet vision. The final piece of that was our acquisition of SilverStream and bringing Web services development into OneNet. The company has now focused around four areas: secure identity management, Web services development, cross-platform network services, and consulting and technical services.

What's the future of NetWare and how will it fit into your vision for Novell?

The market looks at us and sees a NetWare company. That's an image we need to change. NetWare is an underpinning of the vision, just as other technologies are. Our client base is large and strong - certainly not as large as Microsoft's, but with 90 million users out there and quite a few million servers, we have a loyal and happy installed base. We want to give NetWare users more options - a development environment for applications that can run on NetWare. Our tact is to strengthen the NetWare base, but also recognize that the market is less concerned about the [operating system] today. Since the value of NetWare is the services it provides, why not take those services and put them on different platforms?

Where does your 64-bit version of NetWare for the Itanium processor stand?

There is a large team working on the next-generation of NetWare. We have an internal project called Nakoma. SilverStream is porting its application server to Nakoma so we will have an application delivery platform. In terms of 64-bit, there is running code.