* Financial analyst questions Novell's costs and management
Recently, Banc of America Securities analyst Kirk Materne suggested that Novell “take a harder line on costs until its NetWare platform declines start to slow.”
Does that mean he expects sales of NetWare will stabilize or begin to grow? Does he know something we don’t? I’d dismiss this as, perhaps, the ravings (do securities analysts rave?) of a crazed person except he also suggested that perhaps it’s time for Jack Messman to step aside as CEO. “We believe Novell’s current challenges require a CEO with an operational and sales background,” is what he said. (It appears that securities analysts also use the royal “we”.)
You all know that, more than once, I’ve suggested that perhaps Messman might want to relinquish the CEO title he acquired when he let Eric Schmidt go. You know Schmidt, now CEO at Google – arguably the most successful high tech company since Microsoft or IBM. Well let’s see, last I looked, Google’s stock was just under $400 a share, while Novell’s stock was languishing at $5 plus change, per share.
Still, if Materne only manages to be half right, I think I’d rather that he was right about NetWare sales – that would make a much bigger difference to most of the readers of this newsletter than would the name of the CEO in Waltham. I’ll remind you of these predictions the next few times Novell reports financials.
While we’re waiting for that, I wanted to mention a new release from a longtime Novell partner. Passlogix was the pioneer and is still the pre-eminent vendor in the single sign-on space (see this news release about a Passlogix and Novell partnership, for example).
The company has now released v-GO Credential Manager (v-GO CM), used for issuing, managing and revoking strong authentication devices such as smart cards, tokens, biometrics and proximity cards.
Novell, of course, was one of the first identity product vendors to incorporate strong multi-factor authentication but has always supported a somewhat limited number of partners in that space. Using v-GO CM, though, you can essentially extend your eDirectory strong authentication to an almost unlimited number of devices. Get the white paper (PDF), read about v-GO CM and see if it might improve your security.
