Hello Paul,
I appreciate the response and the opportunity. I will preface this message by saying that I have no real control over what Novell chooses to do. I can lobby, and yell, and try and contribute in internal meetings, however there are other people in charge of direction.
I will also say that I don't know that there is a "sure bet" solution, just some indications from the marketplace and customers, coupled with "intuition" built upon experience in the market. I will try and contribute some of my observations that make me feel that things are changing.
> Living in New York always does something for the way you express
> yourself
I'm not sure I caught the meaning of this.
> So let's have a little objective debate here. You from the inside
> and me from the outside.
I will state that in this debate I am almost on the "outside" also. My comments are not made by me representing Novell ... these are simply my opinions as a shareholder and technologist.
> Tell us all what your solution is for salvaging the 3.X small
> server end of the market for Novell without competing with MSFT?
Well, first I do not think there is anyway *not* to compete with Microsoft unless you are in the sanitary engineering field ... of course Bill will one day recognize the money in garbage and want his cut! ;-)
> Or if you believe that end of the market SHOULD be abandoned by
> Novell, tell us why?
I also do not believe that this end of the market should be abandoned. I simply believe that with the technological changes in the market, coupled with the growing social awareness of the Internet, there is room for a whole shift in the way people think about computing and business software. Differentiation is not always having one more do-dad in a product than the competitor ... it involves creating a whole new reality ... a new way that things are done. I feel that the small business market is going to be changed in a way like this. I think that any offering to this market can not just be one more bundle or feature, but the creation of a truely beneficial, new way of looking at business computing.
Wacky prophacy #1: The Internet is the developing nervous system of the human organism on earth. Think about this carefully.
1. The Internet *is* going to alter our lives, alter business, and be the foundation of the future of the human race. I know that you might at first dismiss this, but it is only a matter of time. All customers that I talk to today are connected or connecting to the Internet. Novell has connection technologies.
2. Bandwidth is increasing at a phenominal rate. With T1s, XDSL, ATM, and ISDN (besides 28.8k and 56k modems!) customers are seeing bandwidth that is far beyond that imagined only 5 years ago. Technologies and ideas that were tried less than ten years ago are now becoming feasable. Novell supports all of these new technologies.
3. New technologies such as Java are creating a whole new model of applications and they are becoming more and more useful. Actual business applications are appearing (i.e. Corel, and go look at the Java Solutiond Guide at catalyst.sun.com This means that the concepts of software installation and delivery are able to change dramatically. This means that the "rental" or "leasing" of software can take on a new meaning and become possible. Novell is working quickly to fully support Java.
4. The importance of ISPs will become more apparent as they take on the form of full blown utilities. Just like your power company and water company, you will have your computing utility that will provide you with computing resources. Just as you just want your electricy and water, you will just want your computing ability. You will not want to think about installation, maintenance, upgrades, backup, and uptime. You will just want it there ... just like you do other utilities. Some ISPs have already started to recognize this fact are are trying to get lined up to provide this new model. Novell can deliver Java applications, and can provide back-end server support for Java objects.
5. For this to work, secure business must be able to occur. I will argue that Directories are key to this happening. I will elaborate in a later post about some of the details, but they provide the foundation of authentication and authorization ... two of the key components of commerce. Novell has the largest installed base of directory users with NDS.
6. Efficient communications and use of bandwidth are key to the success of this, and hierachical caching will become fundamental to the Internet. Border services such as Novell's BorderManager provide this.
All of this leads me to believe that much of the solution has to focus on ISPs (such as our focus on the world's telecom companies) along with local ISPs. Small businesses will find that new alternatives to the "buy everything, and then pay someone to support you, and then do back-ups, and make sure your Internet presence is working" approach will begin to appear.
The small business will be able to approach a local ISP that will provide an on site "connectivity server" that will provide connectivity to the ISP, local storage, proxy caching, and connectivity. The ISP might possibly lease, or not even charge for the machine.
The ISP will then provide:
1. high-bandwidth access to the Internet for the small business
2. high-bandwidth access for customers coming to the small business
3. directory replication and to the ISP site for backup and public access
4. file and data replication to their site for backup
5. caching of web and e-commerce activity at their site for performance
6. "rented" or "leased" applications that will be delivered from the ISPs site and cached at the customers location (i.e. Java applications) Acess control to these applications can be controlled by a directory, and all updates and maintenance will be controlled by the ISP
I know that this is a long post so I will end it now.
I don't believe that Novell should attack the current model of small business computing, but should be pursuing this newer model that is bound to occur. I would invite any comments on this since I will admit that these are only opinions ... but Novell is working on the foundations of these technologies.
> =======================================
> I refuse to debate if you refuse to recognize that you have lost a
> significant number of small server Novell customers to NT. I think
> you should be able to agree to that given so I'm waiting......
Oh yes ... the un-manageable NT has mindshare and is selling. Can you imagine if you had to maintain your own power generation and water? And if the equipment you were using worked like Microsoft operating systems ... where would we be? I'm glad that we will move away from this insecure, unrealible, high-cost-of-ownership model.
Scott C. Lemon |
