* BorderManager 3.9 to ship in January; Small Business Suite is no more
A couple of my predictions came true recently, one getting “huzzah!”s while the other got the raspberry.
Novell finally, officially, announced that BorderManager 3.9 will ship. It’s not due until January, though, but at least it is now official. According to the press release, it “…will include enhancements such as a single, consolidated management framework; a Linux VPN client; and more robust and user-friendly site-to-site VPN services.” That’s not news to most of us, I’ll bet, since we’ve been talking about it for months. The only real surprise is why it will take so long to get out the door.
The second announcement was harder to take. Novell’s Small Business Suite (formerly NetWare for Small Business) officially ceased to exist on July 31. Interestingly, on the product page where the “retirement” is announced, there’s also a blurb and a link to an article in Connection magazine, which touts: “Novell Small Business Suite provides the affordability, reliability, ease-of-use and security so customers can focus on business, not technology, and still gain scalability, simplified management, and increased productivity.” It seems ironic until you realize that the story is two-years-old.
Novell wants Small Business Suite customers to migrate to the new Novell Open Workgroup Suite (NOWS), which the company claims “… provides organizations of all sizes with a secure, flexible and cost-effective IT infrastructure and a proven set of workgroup services made up of flexible, standards-based software.” Novell goes on to claim that, like Small Business Suite, “Novell Open Workgroup Suite brings you many of your favorite Novell applications-plus much more:
* Industry-leading enterprise networking services in Novell Open Enterprise Server.
* A secure and reliable collaboration solution in Novell GroupWise.
* A cross-platform systems-management tool in the Novell ZENworks Suite.
* An open source Linux desktop in SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop.
* An open source productivity suite in the Novell Edition of OpenOffice.org for Windows and Linux.
* An open source Linux server for applications in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.”
NOWS is more expensive than the Small Business Suite, costing $475 for the first five users and $100/user after that. Compare that to the cost of Small Business Suite, which was free in a five-user version when you bought the installation services from a Novell partner. But general street price was $50 per seat.
Of course, you do get the Linux desktop (Small Business Suite was server software only) – but are you really ready to move all of your small business users to a Linux desktop? It’s quite likely that the productivity software they’re using won’t migrate. And it’s highly likely that any vertical market applications won’t, either. They may end up paying a bunch for desktop operating systems that they never use. That sounds like a disincentive to me.
