Microsoft targets NetWare with migration incentives

Fresh off striking a conciliatory tone with Novell, Microsoft is now going on the offensive with a program to woo NetWare users to the Windows platform.

Microsoft on Tuesday laid out a program of financial incentives, tools, prescriptive guidance, training and technical support in an effort to get NetWare users to migrate to Windows Server 2003. The move comes less than a week after Microsoft settled lingering anti-trust legislation with Novell.

But Novell is again on the Microsoft radar after acquiring SuSE Linux one year ago and retooling its middleware lineup around the Linux platform.

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Fresh off striking a conciliatory tone with Novell, Microsoft is now going on the offensive with a program to woo NetWare users to the Windows platform.

Microsoft on Tuesday laid out a program of financial incentives, tools, prescriptive guidance, training and technical support in an effort to get NetWare users to migrate to Windows Server 2003. The move comes less than a week after Microsoft settled lingering anti-trust legislation with Novell.

But Novell is again on the Microsoft radar after acquiring SuSE Linux one year ago and retooling its middleware lineup around the Linux platform.

Novell is threatening to Microsoft because it has a cache of corporate infrastructure tools that it can meld with its Linux platform much like the services – including the directory and management tools -- Microsoft has for its own operating system.

The move on Novell is the opening salvo on Linux vendors. Microsoft officials said in September that their year-old “Get The Facts” campaign against Linux would shift from targeting the open source operating system in general to the individual companies that market the software, including Novell, Red Hat and IBM.

“Looking at the Novell SuSE acquisition and the momentum they got from that we realized this was an inflection point for customers to consider some broader options,” says Amanda Morgan, group product manager for platform strategy at Microsoft.

“Customers said the [migration] hurdle wasn’t so much the dollars, it was the tools and training for migration.”

With that information, Morgan said, Microsoft created the U.S. Mid-Market NetWare Migration Promotion, which was unveiled on Tuesday. The promotion, targeted at small-and-midsize businesses, offers users a $600 subsidy on purchase of partner services to help with NetWare migrations. The subsidy applies to each Windows Server 2003 license purchased with 50 client access licenses. The limit is 25 servers per customer.

On top of the financial incentive, Microsoft also is including its Services for NetWare, a set of interoperability utilities available free from its Web site. Also available for customers with more than 1,000 users is a 20% discount on Quest Software’s NDS Migrator, a tool for moving from Novell’s directory to Microsoft’s Active Directory.

The program’s training plan includes a half-day Novell GroupWise to Microsoft Exchange migration workshop, and a two-day NetWare to Windows planning and migration workshop. Also included are step-by-step migration guidance manuals for both Service for NetWare and the Quest tool. Users also get unlimited migration technical support via Microsoft newsgroups.

The caveat of the program is that it only applies to purchases made Oct. 25, 2004 to May 1, 2005 or until the first 1,000 claims for the services and financial incentives.

The NetWare program is being driven by Microsoft’s platform strategies group, which is run by Martin Taylor. Taylor spearheaded Microsoft’s Get the Facts in an attempt to show Microsoft is a better value than Linux. The program has included some controversial analyst reports sponsored by Microsoft that extol the virtues of Windows compared to Linux on such things as security, reliability and total cost of ownership.