Jim,
I have to answer that question (although I did about a week ago). Companies that are not currently at IntranetWare (4.11) on all their servers MUST upgrade their operating systems before the year 2000 in order to implement Y2K compliant code - MUST. Therefor, if you were a company that had 100 NetWare 4.0, 4.01, or 4.02 servers, then why would you pay for an upgrade to IntranetWare when you could jump right to NetWare 5.
The same is true for any NetWare 3.11 or previous server code that is out there. They MUST upgrade to either IntranetWare or NetWare 5. So tell me Jim, what would you do? Simply ignore the upgrade and risk your company after Jan 1 2000.
That is why I think Novell's NetWare 5 sales will go through the roof! Not only will Novell get the sales from those organizations that are leading edge and/or need the technologies that NetWare 5 has to offer, but, thanks to the Y2K situation, Novell will finally get the foot-draggers off the fence and upgrade. This results in BIG REVENUE for Novell folks! This results in BIG Q3/1998 Q4/1998 Q1/1999 profits!
If I were those companies, I would be testing the NetWare 5 betas in my lab, and start making migration planning for late this year. By that time Novell will likely have released one or two Service Patches to NetWare 5 and would have worked out the initial bugs. Then I would begin implementing the upgrade to NetWare 5 in the last quarter of 1998 and first quarter of 1999.
And Jim, before you respond with "by Novell forcing people to upgrade, many will be pissed and go to MSFT NT", let me answer that. NOT! (Although I'm sure a few dummies might be out there that run there IT department by their emotions and not their brains).
1) If your company has a large investment in any file/print infrastructure (regardless if its NOVL or MSFT) you will do anything to avoid a transition to another platform. This activity is very costly and very disruptive. With year 2000 just around the corner, thats all an IT shop need, another huge complexity in the mix.
2) MSFT NT4 is still not Y2K compliant and MSFT has not yet given out any action plans to their customer on what they should do with NT4. My guess is that MSFT will eventually say that their NT4 customers will have to upgrade to NT5 (similar to what Novell did). The bad thing about that (if that is what MSFT will do) is that NT5 will not be available until Q2 1999. Then with the first service patch not for about another Quarter, this gives most companies no time to safely implement NT5. That is why Gartner Group has strongly recommended to their subscribers NOT to upgrade to NT until after 2000.
So there is my short and sweet answer as to why people WILL BUY NetWare 5.
ToySoldier |
