Novell Offers Help To Thailand's Cash Crunched Buyers
Novell Offers Help To Thailand's Cash Crunched Buyers 09/08/97 BANGKOK, THAILAND, 1997 SEP 8 (NB) -- By Rommuk Piachan, The Nation. Novell Thailand [NASDAQ:NOVL] has suggested large account customers buy its software products through a licensing system to help reduce the problems caused by the baht flotation. The float has forced the price of software products up by 20 to 30 percent when distributors order from Novell in the United States.
In the past, Novell software has been sold as a package but the company is now promoting the marketing of licences for companies which order more than US$5,000 worth of products.
Suthas said the company has been promoting licensing for almost three months and it will help customers in the current sluggish economic conditions. When customers buy products through the licence system they will be provided with membership which helps them to acquire Novell software products cheaper compared to buying them as a package.
However, the software packages will still be on sale for small companies but it is expected that the licensing system will be more popular.
Meanwhile Suthas Kongdumrongkiat, the company's country manager, said that Novell is planning to move customers of its existing operating system for LAN Netware in Thailand to IntranetWare, the current operating system of Novell, to support the Internet/intranet trend, within the next two years.
It is not only Novell which has prepared measures to help distributors and customers during the country's financial crisis. It is difficult for IT companies to consider certain measures since the value of the baht has not stabilized.
"In this situation we have to support our distributors since we have to do business together in the long term,' said Suthas.
Though the country's economy is on its knees, large customers like those in banking, education and government departments are still ordering Novell software in large numbers. He added that IntraNetware in particular, which is the new operating system from Novell to support Internet and intranet applications, is now in the early stages in the LAN market in Thailand. Suthas said a number of users of Netware, the old operating system, are now upgrading to IntraNetware.
Novell's policy is to move Netware customers to IntraNetware platforms within the next two years. He said the trend towards Internet and intranet systems will help the company implement the policy. The cheaper prices of the upgrade versions are expected to increase IntraNetware installations as well.
In Thailand, 90 percent of local area network (LAN) users are using Netware as their operating system. Not only in Thailand, Novell's Netware has been the dominant operating system software for local area networks for many years.
Computer trends will not be limited only to LAN but are expanding to WAN. Many experts have said that Novell will be in difficult position, not only with the merging of LAN and WAN but also from the aggressive moves by Microsoft Windows NT into LAN. Suthas said to maintain leadership in this market, Novell's products from now will focus on Internet and intranet which is the future trend of the network computing environment.
Offering low cost upgrades to IntraNetware is also a strategy to maintain the number of Netware customers. Suthas said moving to IntraNetware is not complicated while it will be more complicated if Netware customers move to the NT platform since they will face a configuration problem.
(19970908/ Reported By Newsbytes News Network: newsbytes.com |
