* Reader experiences Novell reseller confusion over Linux
Last issue, I talked about Novell’s plan to roll out Linux on the desktop to 5,000 users and how, according to a news report, the company’s target of 2,500 by this month had fallen short – by 1,000 users. I received a note from a reader last week, detailing his experience with Novell, a reseller, SuSE Linux and SuSE’s OpenExchange product which might shed some light on Novell’s problem in rolling out Linux to its users. Here’s what the reader had to say:
“We were potentially looking at a new mail system about two months ago and I thought that I would give SuSE’s (Novell’s) OpenExchange a try. It took about two days for a reseller to contact me after I submitted my interest via a Web page. When he did, I found out that I actually had to pay for a demo version. After I mentioned how serious I was about trying the product and the fact I was not going to pay for a demo version he agreed to ‘loan’ me a standard licensed version that I could use as a trial version. I played with it for a total of about four hours.
“If you use anything newer than Office 2000 as a client it doesn’t work. It took a total of about three weeks from the time I expressed interest in the product to the point where I actually had a version that I could play with. Neither the salesman nor the company that he was working for knew the product didn’t work with Office 2003 – they had to contact Novell. After one more business day, I got a phone call saying ‘You’re right, it doesn’t work’.”
Note that it was the Novell recommended reseller who didn’t know what the requirements were. Note also that while you can freely download an evaluation copy of SuSE Enterprise Server that you can’t get a free demo of OpenExchange. And three weeks to actually get the demo product in-house? Well, part of that might be attributed to the training that the reseller had gone through. As the reader added:
“I’ve always been a fan of Novell back in the [NetWare] 4.1 days but after this episode, I’ll never talk to them again. They let their reseller handle the whole thing, which turned out to be a huge waste of time. The reseller wasn’t properly trained and at times couldn’t remember if SuSE was Novell’s product or if it was IBM’s. It seems that SuSE and Novell don’t properly communicate with their resellers and can’t offer anything substantially more than what you can download free from RedHat.”
Now it may be that this was an atypical reseller. And it may be that Novell was so busy rolling and (and documenting the rollout) of Linux in-house, that reseller training suffered. But it seems at least equally plausible that the integration of SuSE into the corporate structure of Novell is “missing the target” just as the migration of desktops from Windows to Linux is doing.
Could it be that, when it comes to Linux and open source, Novell bit off more than it could chew and is suffering integration indigestion? This might be just a bump in the road on the path to the new open source future, or it may be the sign of some serious problems ahead. I’ll keep monitoring the progress, and you should keep writing to let me know about your experience.
