Hello Victor,
> With apparently nothing urgent to discuss here...<ggg>
... and I thought that the announcements about AOL blocking all interoperability with their AOL Instant Messenger product was going to spring up somewhere ... ;-)
> I think it would be interesting to have your perspective on why
> CSCO is not endorsing NDS.
Hmmm ... I can try to provide some analysis and "guesses" ...
> I know the political stuff and the contracts and yada yada and the
> issue has been discussed before over and over.. and ..
I know that at one time, Cisco had tied themselves tightly to Microsoft contractually and were not permitted to work with other directories ... they signed on the Active Directory dotted line ...
But that supposedly expired a while ago, and that's when we first started to see the press about the possible NDS adoption, or support. Since then it has been pretty silent on this front ...
> but CSCO is competing with companies like Lucent and Nortel that
> are already deploying their stuff NDS ready or even bundled..
It could be that they still want to "own" their solution, and then provide some level of interoperability. Remember that eDirectory was just announced, and that means that it's not quite there. I'm wondering if Cisco is wanting a directory that they can own, and maybe provide compatibility via a common standard like LDAP v3. The other issue would be to have a directory in an "appliance" form-factor for their customers ... there are a lot of shops that aren't interested in supporting yet another OS (NetWare) and want a UNIX solution ... they might want to offer their own product, and then also provide the compatibility if the customer really wants to use NDS ...
> if MAD is so bad wouldn't CSCO be hurt tremendously? On the other
> hand we know the folks at CSCO are smarter than this and they are
> dominant in their space..
Well, on the first hand, I'm not sure that MAD is so bad ... it's the first cut that Microsoft will make towards directories ... but Microsoft is very good at iterative development. If it's missing some features, they will fix it. The most important thing about the directory is the data that is in it (Ed Reed, where are you?) and the applications that utilize this data. I'm sure that Microsoft will have a strong focus in this area ....
The other aspect is that, I think, Cisco has a source license for MAD ... so they have access to the source code and can make the changes and enhancements they need for their own solutions. If this is the case, then Cisco can continue to improve the product, and differentiate themselves from the other vendors ...
> Maybe you could help me understand what is going on here..
I don't know if any of this is helpful, or even absolutely correct ... but they are some guesses on what might be happening ...
> On caching I was disappointed to see that SUN decided to go with
> INKT although this is not an exclusive arrangement. Why isn't SUN
> licensing this thing??
Ahhh ... this is an easier one ...
Novell's ICS is written specifically to the Intel processors and commodity hardware ... SUN doesn't do much in this area! Inktomi is written to run on UNIX and so it plays well in the SUN hardware/software market. Inktomi is also software which isn't very efficient in processing, so it requires *big* SUN boxes ... read that as expensive! ;-)
> What is the strategy here to have ICS only on NT servers?
No ... ICS doesn't run on NT Servers ... it's based on the NetWare kernel and only runs on NetWare today. While at Novell I suggested several times that the code be given to Caldera to port to Linux, where the only solution today is Squid ... the original "open source" proxy/cache. But for now, BorderManager and ICS are NetWare only solutions. On a side note, this is the reason why ICS performs so well ... NetWare is the best performing OS for these types of tasks ...
> Oh well..
Hope that this helps, and provides some input for further discussions ...
> PS the managers here seem to want to have it both ways: one the one
> hand they *complain* about the high valuations of tech companies
> and why "slow and steady" is better..on the other hand they are
> very happy to cash the absurd option benefits that can only be
> possible because of the incredible valuations...of other
> companies..Maybe I have to conclude that they believe that NOVL is
> also overvalued here? I know the MSFT folks (valued at last count
> at how many bills 200--300--400--500...??) think that way..but NOVL
> oscillating between 3-->6 bill??
On a related note ... I was looking on Yahoo at the "Insider" information to check on sales of stock by Novell insiders. There is an entry for Stuart Nelson on September 30th which states "Holdings" and says "0" ... does this mean he has no more share/options? What does this particular entry indicate?
Scott C. Lemon |
