* Some observations from GWAVACon
Last week’s visit to GWAVACon confirmed a couple of things for me. First, Novell has a large base of very loyal customers that remind me in many ways of Mac users – they tend to be quite vocal in support of their platforms and have an almost religious zeal for GroupWise and other Novell technologies that managers of other systems don’t have, at least to the same degree.
Second, Novell needs to do a better job at exploiting some of its strengths. For example, one GroupWise customer has 26,000 users and only one full-time administrator, a user-to-admin that many messaging systems just cannot match. Organizations can upgrade to GroupWise 7 in minutes without investing in new hardware. Plus, the system is relatively immune to a wide variety of threats and targeted attacks.
However, those advantages represent one of the reasons that GroupWise occupies a distant third place in the total enterprise installed base for messaging and collaboration systems. Success in this market occurs because of selling technical advantages and user advantages, but the GroupWise advantages that are most often touted are the former, not the latter.
The bottom line is that GroupWise is a very solid and capable messaging and collaboration system for administrators and users alike. But so are Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes/Domino and lots of other systems with which GroupWise competes. The key difference seems to be that the GroupWise marketing is aimed more at technical people and less at business decision-makers, while other vendors focus to a greater degree on things like employee productivity, improved user experiences, business benefits and other advantages.
I’d like to hear from you about my conclusions: am I completely in the dark or is there something to what I’m saying? Please drop me an e-mail with your thoughts.
