* The long farewell to NetWare
I came across an interesting article in Network World’s sister publication, InfoWorld, last month that looked at the future of NetWare (see link below). It didn’t offer anything new from executives at Novell, quoting Novell CTO Alan Nugent to the effect that Novell will continue to support NetWare customers into the future. He and others have told me the same thing at various times. And, while it is an important commitment that Novell won’t abandon customers the way Banyan did when it dropped the Vines networking software, it really means that Novell is not going to be improving or extending NetWare.
In fact, according to the story, Novell will be shrinking some support for the platform. While NetWare 6 provided Novell’s own Extend application environment running on a J2EE platform on a NetWare server, Novell’s future direction is to place Extend within the JBoss environment on a Linux platform. It could be expected that other services, heretofore supported on the NetWare server, will be migrated to a Linux platform with whatever environment is necessary to support them.
To me, the most telling quote in the article was from Gary Hein, vice president of application platform strategies at the Burton Group (and I confirmed this with Hein at the recent Catalyst Conference): “There are a lot of things in NetWare that you still can’t do on Windows or Linux. But at the end of the day, it’s not about how cool technology is. I think the writing is on the wall, and NetWare is going to be in continued decline.” Hein ought to know, he was one of the “three amigos” (https://www.nwfusion.com/newsletters/netware/2002/01353981.html) known to thousands of BrainShare attendees for the entertaining and informative demonstrations of technology they put on.
Hein knows NetWare, and he knows Novell. His “second coming” to the company in 2002 lasted less than a year before he joined the Burton Group. When he says NetWare is going away, then we all should pay close attention.
Now before you fire off that nasty e-mail to me, I’m not trying to paint a picture of “gloom and doom.” Novell, it seems to me, is right in making a move to embrace Linux and open source. Few companies get a second chance to be successful. Fewer still can do it. But Novell certainly stands a good chance of being one of them. Still, NetWare remains one of the finest server operating systems ever developed. It will be a shame when it’s relegated to museum status.
