* NetWare sales still on the up, says Avanti's Steve Meyer
I was chatting with Steve Meyer the other day. He’s the Avanti Technology guy, the brain behind TaskMaster and a friend of NetWare for many, many years. We’ve mentioned his utilities in this newsletter a few times and have always found that customers and potential customers are not disappointed with the products.
But back to our chat, which came in the wake of the executive suite turnovers in Waltham a couple of weeks ago. Meyer wanted to mention some sales figures and trends that he recently plotted, and which seemed surprising in light of Novell’s financial reports and the reactions of the Wall Street analysts.
According to Meyer, TaskMaster sales have climbed every year since 2000 (an exceptional year for the company, thanks to the U.S. Census Bureau’s selection of TaskMaster over Novell’s own NRS for the bureau’s Dicennial Census project involving 500 servers, each with a three-year maintenance agreement). But beyond that, the annual sales increase for TaskMaster was in the low double digits rate until Novell began aggressively shifting focus and pushing users towards SuSE Linux. Then, Steve said, the 2005 sales for TaskMaster were 52% more than 2004 while 2006 is well ahead of last year’s pace.
Remember, TaskMaster is a NetWare tool. It runs as an NLM on a NetWare server!
Meyer went on to add that what he really considers most interesting are the size of the accounts that Avanti is being introduced to by both IBM and Novell, as well as the activity at some of the company’s existing major accounts. Meyer said that this year, IBM’s custom solutions group has recommended TaskMaster to a major airline (65 servers) and a major insurance company (100 servers), and now both are using TaskMaster.
Meyer adds that Novell reps (and when’s the last time you saw one of those?) have recommended TaskMaster to a couple of major financial institutions (new prospect for 350 servers, expected to grow to over 500 within a year, and another site expanding from 75 to 125-plus servers). While both are still in evaluation stages, Meyer thinks they are leaning very heavily towards the proposed NetWare/TaskMaster system.
An existing account, a major pharmaceutical company, has increased its license count (for the third year in a row) by 100 (currently at 501 servers) as part of its plan to upgrade all its servers to NetWare v6.5 (from NetWare v5.1).
Both domestically and internationally, Meyer claims to be seeing a lot of small sites, but also mid- to large-sized ones, adding servers to their installed NetWare server count. And he still regularly hears from people who are new to NetWare when investigating TaskMaster.
Significantly, I think, Meyers says he is getting more requests for NetWare-specific enhancements than requests for porting TaskMaster to Linux or Windows.
He remains very upbeat about NetWare, and says of all the talk about drastically declining sales (paraphrasing Mark Twain): “Me thinks the epitaph was a bit premature.
That’s certainly good news to hear. By the way, if you happen to run a NetWare Users International (NUI) chapter, and don’t already have one of Avanti’s Penguin Stress Balls drop Meyer a note and ask if you can adopt one. They look great sitting on a NetWare server!
