Novell: For NOW....N_T Later
Date: Mon, Aug 24, 1998 07:16 EDT
From: FKSmart
Message-id: <1998082411164500.HAA01326@ladder03.news.aol.com>
Tilt:
>>Also Novell has 34 million share to buyback - would you pump up the price of the stock with positive projections.>>
Let's not get too carried away with this. If you listened closely to the call, they stated this program would continue to reflect the board's overall objective to keep the total number of shares "flat" over time.
Offering stock options that are covered by open market purchases in the market are a very good use of their cash. This will empower their workforce with additional incentives to keep the pressure on as they climb their next mountain.
I, too, was underwhealmed by the lack of clarity on expectations on future sales of NW 5.0. Gartner's 5% prediction is a wild card. I sense these expectations are muted because conversion upgradge to NW 4.11 are really coming along quite well among major accounts as reflected in these big MLA contracts that have generated a surprisingly strong upward deferred revenue stream which bodes well longer term for future eventual upgrades to 5.0. As a
'new account" the First Union news is gigantic. In addition to the telecom cos. I think banks will be a great source of business for Novell. J.P. Morgans continued support and additional business commitment to Novell was another big plus. Support from Walmart, Worldcom and others were very nice additions to the pie.
What Novell needs to do is breath fire down every CEO & CIO's neck. Eric and Slitz need to take off the gloves, point the flamethrower down into the lion's mouth, climb in, prop up the jaw with some sounding poles and get on with directing the singing, dancing show behind this great new NW 5.0 story.
Every techie who knows his/her stuff is dying to see the day when the real NT story is laid out there for all the world to see: closed, insecure, low scalability, high cost to support and maintain. Every techie knows that NT is this fraud invited into club-enterprise 2-3 years too early. NT gave a lot of the lighweight techies a new lease on life, but the downside is that they've attached themselves to a technology networking albatross that's
frozen for the next 2+ years. However attractive it is as an application server, NT does nothing to support the kind of openness and power needed to run huge corporate networks that coporate networks need NOW as they accelerate the process of drilling their businesses down into the Internet.
This is no time to be bashful. The time is NOW. Novell has an incredible opportunity to leverage its huge lead in Directory technology, bandwidth throughput, stability, security, Y2K compliancy, G3 certification, Java app platform integration, JVM speed, lowest total cost of ownership. All this combined with their superior groupware offerings and extremely impressive new list of products, from BorderManager, ZEN Works....on and on and on.
If I were marketing Novell I'd be scaring the holy bejesus' out these misinformed country-clubbing golfcarting CEO/CFO's. The gathering steam behind Novell's turnaround needs to become a gathering storm. Slitz needs to take off his necktie, grab these clowns out of their golfcarts, wrestle them onto the grass, get on their backs and just keep hitting, sharing, spotting, driving, plowing the points home.
Eric, I'd be happy to go along with anyone of your salesmen for a primer on how all this is done on a live sales call - on or off the golf course. Just give me a call at (877) 99-SMART.
Novell: The Smart Choice In Networking
Novell: The Smart Network
Novell: For NOW...N_T Later
I just couldn't resist.
Ida5683
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