VK
I have been reading your negative posts for a couple months now and I have to correct you on this one. I am an Account Executive for Novell and my sales of GroupWise are exploding with many competitive knockouts of CC:Mail and MS Mail in particular. You mention that GroupWise has no growth prospect, but if you knew what you were talking about, you would know that Novell has taken that product from 2.5 million users to 6.5 million users in about a two year period. It is the fastest growing groupware product in the industry and it has won many industry awards. If you do not call that growth, I do not know what planet you live on. Futhermore, GroupWise growth is not dependent on NetWare 4.1 or IntranetWare for that matter. One of it's strenghts is the fact that it runs on NetWare, Unix, OS/2, and NT. This is a huge benefit for customers because they can leverage existing server platforms and future server platforms no matter what they decide to deploy as their messaging server platform. I can give you many reasons why IntranetWare is the best platform for messaging, but as far as GroupWise is concerned, it is not tied to IntranetWare's success.
Which brings me to my second point, IntranetWare is being accepted very well by my customers. I have public and private sector customers who are "chomping at the bit" to get their hands on IntranetWare. Novell is delivering a complete solution for customers to move from a NOS to a full service intranet platform that will seemlessly allow secure and high performance connections to the Internet. No other company is providing as complete a solution as Novell is with IntranetWare. You may find this a bit of a surprise, but if you look at Novell's third quarter, we made more money in profit than Netscape has made in revenue in their entire existance. The other reality in the market is that customers are going to have multiple web servers in their environments, just like they have multiple servers in their environment today. Novell's web server is the fastest performing web server on the Intel platform, PERIOD! I do not know of a customer who would prefer a slower web server, do you? Novell's web server is also integrated with the number one installed directory service, Novell's Directory Service. Netscape and Microsoft are dreaming about having a heirarchical, partitionable, replicatable directory service some day, while Novell has been delivering just that for over three years. While the Microsoft NT Server and IIS people are writing CGI calls to an MS Access or MS SQL Server database just to allow their users to view information on employees in their company, the IntranetWare people are using the Novell Web Server to expose information on employess which already exists in NDS. Would you rather spend countless days writing calls to a database (which you must purchase and maintain separately)just to expose information on employees (like telephone numbers and job resposibilities) in that database or would you rather LEVERAGE THE EXISTING INFORMATION IN NDS, which literally takes just minutes? I guess if you a consultant and are being paid by the hour, you would choose the slow and inefficent way so as to maximize your profits. However, if you were the owner of a company that is trying to allow better communications within his or her organization, you would choose the solution that is least costly and most efficient. THAT SOLUTION IS INTRANETWARE!
Finally, I cannot believe your comments about ManageWise. Every single customer that I have has either bought ManageWise, is in the process of buying ManageWise, or is seriously considering it. Once again VK is wrong. The fact is that ManageWise has 34% of the total installed base of network management products and that is THE NUMBER ONE MARKET SHARE HOLDER IN TOTAL NETWORK MANAGEMENT. HP Openview is certainly a major player in the network management arena, but Openview and ManageWise do different things. If you were knowlegable about the network management market VK, you would know that there are many different tools being deployed by customers to perform various managemet functions across their networks. ManageWise is very complementary to HP Openview, Sun Net Manager, IBM Netview and a host of other platforms. Customers are choosing to use the RIGHT TOOL FOR THE RIGHT JOB. That means that large customers will use HP Openview for some things and ManageWise for others.
My last thought is that all of you and the industry as a whole have to get over the "all or nothing" attitude about networking solutions. One company's success does not automatically mean another company's demise. This is a huge, fast growing industry and there is a lot of room for many players. That is of course, if those players deliver the solutions that solve customer problems. If you forget all of the emotional hype coming from people like VK and stick to the merits of the solutions, you will realize that Novell has been, is currently,and will always be a major player in the networking industry. Novell is providing the right solutions to meet customer needs today and THAT IS ALL THAT MATTERS. |
