Novell (NOVL) dirt cheap, good buy? Message Board

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Technology Stocks : Novell (NOVL) dirt cheap, good buy?

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To: Jim McCormack who wrote (20958)	3/12/1998 12:07:00 AM
From: ToySoldier	Read Replies (1) of 42771

Good Summary of N-Teir Client/Server. Your right that the ideal, hot, up-and-coming N-Tier model of choice is the 4-tier. Tier 1) ActiveX/Java on Browser clients. Tier 2) Web Servers with Java applets and presentation logic tools. Tier 3) MiddleWare Engines with Business logic and TP Monitor Tier 4) Database and Data Warehousing For many companies the IT shops would be happy to simply be able to achieve successful simple 2 tier models. The battle at the industry level is DCOM vs CORBA or in more layman's terms - its the common Microsoft vs the industry. So you are right in that if a company has decided to follow the industry standard of CORBA then the company will have many solutions and platforms to choose from and incorporate. This is very good for the customer, but not as great for vendors that base their living on selling CORBA compliant software. Novell is not one of those vendors IMO for the following reason. Novell is not betting he farm on nor do they honestly believe they will make a living on the hopes that they will woo software developers in droves to the NetWare 5 platform to do CORBA development. They must have a development platform for many other reasons (described below) but not to turn it into a staple Bread-&-Butter revenue generator. Novell is in and wants to remain focused on (rightly so) the Network Services and Infrastructure products and related revenue. Novell has incorporated the JVM and CORBA compliancy into NetWare 5 for the following reasons (these again are my thoughts on why): 1) To address a long standin marketing/technical weakness that ISVs have complained about, competitors have used against them, and customers are beginning to look for. 2) To provide a better and more flexible toolset to develop server-side utilities (i.e. a JAVA based GUI for NetWare 5 which users of NT keep harping is a selling point for buying NT over NetWare - stupid reason IMO). 3) To prove to the industry that Novell and its products are truely and open industry player that will participate with all the other standard OEM platforms and tools. This is one of the steps that Schmidt has likely carved out. The others would be: move to Native TCP/IP from IPX, implement a full range of Internet/Intranet services on the platform. 4) To actually have increased revenue/sales from NetWare servers being used in the Application Server role (although I don't think this is a major benefit). So then, is Novell in competition with Microsoft? YES - because the customer must first decide on DCOM vs CORBA and that decision many times is made on what platform a customer wants before which model is actually better for them. In other words, customers will say "Well I want to follow where the trade press says everyone else is going - NT, so I guess I have no choice but to go DCOM". (By the way, there already is agreement that a DCOM to CORBA bridge has been developed to link these two models togrether) Then the next question - Does not have to compete with other CORBA players? Well YES and NOT REALLY. YES if they want to make a presence an application server player. NOT REALLY since their purpose for having NetWare 5 an Application server is for many other reasons than to simply sell more servers directly for direct Application Serving. I think more developers will use NetWare servers for application serving as an after-thought convenience "Hey - we have NetWare servers out all over our environment - why the hell don't we leverage them?" By the way - in your competition list of CORBA players you missed one VERY large player - IBM has one of the most mature end-to-end CORBA tools and platforms in the industry. As for your statement that File/Print server are not a growth market. I really beg to differ! We still have substantially more new servers being installed for file/print operations than application servers. Combine that with all the older servers needing upgrading and Application servers are still a much smaller growth potentially IMO. In fact, think how much extra revenue Novell could realize if there old operating systems weren't so good and their clients would finally upgrade from NetWare 2.x and 3.x. I shake my head when I hear people say that File/Print servers are not a growth market. My last comment on a good file/print server doesnt make for a good application server and visa versa. You used the example of how NT run SQL server so well even though it stinks as a file/print server. Have you ever seen the performance results on database engines running on Netware 3.x or 4.x servers. I have. Not only do they blow the doors of a comparable NT server of similar configuration, they even out-perform comparable UNIX based Database engines. I have talked to Sybase reps that have told me they have clients that use their NLM product to provide cost-effective and low cost DB engines. They also confirmed that their NLM platform equals and even out-performs their UNIX platform. (There are other reasons to select a DB engine on the UNIX platform over NetWare - but it ain't because of horsepower). Thanks for the interesting discussion Jim! I enjoyed this discussion better than our first encounter! ToySoldier

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