I'm at the show, but I missed the big event. Sorry.
Regarding presence, Novell is kicking ass. Their booth is twice the size of Microsoft's. They've also got press lounges and executive suites in very visible locations, whereas Microsoft has nothing outside of their booth. Also of note is that Novell is providing the public workstations for the general masses. They're running GroupWise, NAL and Netscape on all the Win95 PCs. Very visible power to the masses, as these systems are supporting ~50,000 accounts! NT/Exchange probably wouldn't have made it past 5,000.
IntranetWare seems to be getting positive reception by the crowds. The announcement itself was a disappointment. Novell is effectively positioning themselves and the product as an upgrade. When they cite the 3.5 million servers, they're talking about the installed base that will naturally tend towards upgrading to IntranetWare as opposed to installing some other platform.
This is good for the short-term, but doesn't offer much hope for the long-term. They've really got to improve the fundamentals of the product before they can offer it as a standalone ready-to-go web server. The NDS tools really need to get beefed up, and the overall integration is no better than running the existing 2.5 web server on top of 4.1, except that it's cheaper. We'll see what happens over the next couple of months.
Still, Novell is doing really well at the show itself. They've got great visibility and are proving that their technology works. Remember that the people attending this show are the IT buyers and recommenders of the networking community.
And, of course, since VK's company has settled on NW 4, this must mean that Novell will be the winners after all. |
