Good right up of the Novell issue with Red Hat and NOVL delayed earnings. Concurrent mentioned.
sys-con.com
Novell Postpones its Earnings Release
It seems that the SEC has questions about certain mysterious 'accounting matters' in last year's 10-K, as well as the 10-Q
By: Maureen O'Gara
Dec. 8, 2007 01:00 PM
Novell Wednesday morning suddenly pulled filing its financial results for its fourth quarter and full year hours before a scheduled conference call with Wall Street, needless to say an uncommon move.
Well, it seems that the SEC has questions about certain mysterious "accounting matters" in last year's 10-K, as well as the 10-Q that Novell filed covering this year's second fiscal quarter ending April 30, and that the company and the watchdog agency have been batting the issues back and forth for the last four months.
The statement Novell put out Wednesday suggests that the issues - evidently material otherwise if wouldn't have delayed its numbers - may have narrowed since discussions with the SEC began.
The company explained that it got a so-called comment letter from the agency about the 10-K and 10-Q on August 7 to which it responded on September 20 and then on October 18, Novell got a second comment letter from the SEC that, it said, "was limited to certain accounting matters."
Novell said it responded to the SEC's second comment letter on November 7 and has been waiting for a response ever since.
Novell didn't file the touchy 10-K on time because of an internal investigation into backdating that started in August of 2006 and delayed the report until May 25 of this year.
Novell chief financial officer Dana Russell said in the company's statement that "We are confident of our accounting" and that "in an abundance of caution, we have chosen to postpone our earnings release."
The company said it expects to file its current 10-K and 10-Q when the review is over and can't forecast when that might be but figures it'll be before its due date of December 31.
Anyway, it just wasn't Novell's day. The news of the SEC's review followed on some potshots taken by its Red Hat rival from London over the SUSE Real Time 10 (SLERT 10) code that Novell started shipping last week.
According to Red Hat VP Scott Crenshaw, Novell is delivering unstable beta code that Red Hat wrote into sensitive environments like Wall Street and it forks the Concurrent-based real-time widgetry that Novell had been supplying prior to last week.
The charges had Novell replying on its web site that "Just because Red Hat is again late to market (see enterprise Linux desktop, Xen virtualization, etc.) doesn't mean Linux contains 'beta code.'"
See, Red Hat won't be delivering its real-time code until next year while Novell has sites like Thomson Financial in production.
Novell would also beg to differ on who wrote what code, reminding Red Hat that "this is open source, remember?…It isn't Red Hat code any more than the millions of lines of code contributed by Novell and others to dozens of open source projects belong to any one organization or individual. That's the open source model … just like Red Hat used to talk about."
Historically Red Hat has been behind Novell in adding the latest and greatest Linux kernel features.
Novell is now using the real-time extensions to Linux 2.6.22 developed by the real-time community as a patch. For the last year or so it used extensions written by real-time expert Concurrent Computer. Now that the Linux community's work is maturing, it's gone over to what will be the standard and it's still supporting the Concurrent kit. |
