What's Novell's message for its legacy business?

Last week was the LinuxWorld Conference at which Novell was a major player. But if you go to Google News and search on "Linuxworld +NetWare" (without the quotes) you'll probably turn up the same six documents I did - and only one of those was by, or about, Novell. (It was mentioned in a news story in an explanation of what's in Open Enterprise Server.)

Now it might have been asking too much that Novell spend whatever time and capital it had at LinuxWorld talking about its legacy products. But it was a great pulpit from which to preach to both the long suffering NetWare/GroupWise/ZENworks/BorderManager faithful and the potential new customers for those technologies. At least one reader, a longtime Novell reseller, thought Novell should have said something. In commenting on the ascension of Ron Hovsepian to the CEO's job as well as the Mirapoint "trade in your obsolete GroupWise" campaign that I've highlighted recently, he had this to say:

So far, all I've heard out of [Hovsepian] is that he wants to push the Linux strategy even harder. But what does that mean for those us preferring to use some of their legacy products? [Jack Messman, former CEO] promised us 9 more years of native NetWare support. Does that promise still hold? It's great that a new release of BorderManager is coming out, but what does that mean for the future of the product - the last hurrah, or a new lease on life? And what about GroupWise? Maybe I'm not tuned in to the right sources (nah - I subscribe to Network World on Novell NetWare, after all...), but Novell's message still seems muddled to me. And that invites exactly the kind of attack Mirapoint is launching."

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Last week was the LinuxWorld Conference at which Novell was a major player. But if you go to Google News and search on "Linuxworld +NetWare" (without the quotes) you'll probably turn up the same six documents I did - and only one of those was by, or about, Novell. (It was mentioned in a news story in an explanation of what's in Open Enterprise Server.)

Now it might have been asking too much that Novell spend whatever time and capital it had at LinuxWorld talking about its legacy products. But it was a great pulpit from which to preach to both the long suffering NetWare/GroupWise/ZENworks/BorderManager faithful and the potential new customers for those technologies. At least one reader, a longtime Novell reseller, thought Novell should have said something. In commenting on the ascension of Ron Hovsepian to the CEO's job as well as the Mirapoint "trade in your obsolete GroupWise" campaign that I've highlighted recently, he had this to say:

So far, all I've heard out of [Hovsepian] is that he wants to push the Linux strategy even harder. But what does that mean for those us preferring to use some of their legacy products? [Jack Messman, former CEO] promised us 9 more years of native NetWare support. Does that promise still hold? It's great that a new release of BorderManager is coming out, but what does that mean for the future of the product - the last hurrah, or a new lease on life? And what about GroupWise? Maybe I'm not tuned in to the right sources (nah - I subscribe to Network World on Novell NetWare, after all...), but Novell's message still seems muddled to me. And that invites exactly the kind of attack Mirapoint is launching."

The important thing here, to me, is that with the change at Novell's senior management any statements and promises Messman made are most likely no longer valid. If the board of directors had merely wanted to maintain the status quo, they wouldn't have made the changes. The new leadership needs to state clearly and unequivocally its intentions for the legacy products. So far, all we have is a weak statement from Hovsepian during a teleconference when he assumed the CEO role that Novell will "...continue to pursue its current product strategy, including Linux and its traditional flagship NetWare, as well as identity, data center and security management tools." He did add, though, that he would focus even more resources on Linux technologies than Novell has thus far. I'll let you know if the company has any more to say.

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