Information Week interviews Marengi (Sept. 23/96)
September 23, 1996
Issue: 598
Section: Networking
Interview -- Novell Faces The Future -- New president discusses his plans
By
Following Bob Frankenberg's resignation as Novell chairman, CEO, and president last month, sales chief Joe Marengi stepped in as president, running the company under interim CEO John Young. While the Novell board searches for a permanent CEO, Marengi is evangelizing Novell's strategy for turning NetWare into an intranet platform and making Novell Directory Services an enterprise directory of directories-all in the name of reviving Novell's sagging profile.
Marengi says he's a candidate for the Novell CEO job, but he hints that someone with a stronger technology background might be a more appropriate chief. He recently talked with InformationWeek managing editor/news John Soat about Novell's position in the market moving forward.
Q. There's been a lot of speculation about Novell possibly being acquired. Are there any talks like that in the works?
A. Everything we're doing, including searching for a CEO, looking at technology investments, building products, expanding the company outside the United States, is being done as a standalone company. The board of directors has a fiduciary responsibility if something like [an acquisition overture] happens to evaluate it and do what's in the best interests of the shareholders, but there's nothing going on right now. This is a standalone company that is actually in much better shape than a lot of people understand.
Q. Could you expand on that a little bit?
A. We're the fourth-largest software company in the world. We're still doing a billion-and-a-half dollars in sales a year. We'll sell roughly a million servers this year. We've got a refresh of all the products that take us into the open standards space coming out over the next two months. We've got a significant customer base that we need to more clearly articulate the future path for, and I think we're doing that quite well right now.
Q. Are you anticipating any significant acquisitions in the near term?
A. I won't say "anticipating." We are always looking for technology acquisitions that fill the line card. The only thing I will say is that everything we do will be calculated as to what it is that we're going after-the Internet space in particular-and continuing to beef up our technology position in that space.
Q. Let me ask you about relationships with other vendors. It would seem that it would be important for Novell to have Netscape servers on NetWare. Do you have a time frame for that?
A. No, I don't have a time frame for it. Obviously, we're working with Netscape right now. We've bundled its browser with Intranetware. All I'll say is that we are working with Netscape to solidify that partnership.
Q. Who else do you see as important partners for Novell?
A. The diplomatic answer is everybody. But honestly, we see Oracle and Compaq as important partners. Some of the telephone companies are obviously important partners in the way that we're developing intranets with them using our directory. If the whole industry is not partnering with each other, the customer loses, so I seriously mean everybody, including Microsoft-anybody that's playing in the space that has to do with management or the infrastructural pieces of the
network.
Q. What about the directory services product-specifically, NDS on NT. What's the time frame for that?
A. First quarter of '97.
Q. How do you plan to ratchet up the visibility of that product?
A. First I want to clear something up. NT in a NetWare environment today resides perfectly as an object in NDS. Today. We've made that the application server manager. It's an agent that sits inside the NT server, it's viewed as an object in the database, and it's managed by Managewise.
Microsoft is kind of pushing a binary decision:It's black or white, either-or. Our view is that if you've made an NT decision, that's your decision as the customer. Our game is to expand and enhance what NT does in your network. So the directory lays on top of it and gives you the access to help support the [lightweight directory access protocol] across the Internet. It gives you the ability to manage the content that's in there. And most importantly, it gives you the authentication
and security that's going to be necessary in any large-scale network. So it doesn't matter to us what you're running underneath; it's that level of service on top that really makes the difference.
Q. Do you plan to hit back aggressively at Windows NT and try to stop NT's momentum?
A. I'm more concerned with how we sell our own product. We're going to compare ourselves with NT in certain cases, and we're going to show why our technology is much more superior than what they offer, but that's not the end game. I want the end user to understand the differences between the products and then make a decision on what they want based on truly understanding what the products do. If management and administration are important to you as a customer, the decision becomes a no-brainer. NetWare is the way to go. It's more the attributes of what we have as opposed to knocking the attributes that
Microsoft has, because I don't want to get dragged into that. We've been there before. We're not going back.
Q. What are you doing to solidify or expand your relationship with the IS community, to show it that Novell is stable and going forward?
A. First is the articulation of our Internet pieces. The key is showing people that there's an evolutionary path on the Internet for Novell and its products, and that we're supporting open standards. Second, we need to put a couple of quarters together that allow people to see that the business is robust. We'll sell a million servers this year. The projections are that we'll double our servers installed by the year 2000 to 8 million from 4 million. And also, with the advertising and a little more aggressive PR, our expectations are to let business leaders, top IT people, see that Novell is alive, Novell is still present in the marketplace.
Copyright * 1996 CMP Media Inc. |
