...Cisco would not provide support for NDS so Lucent will try to attract Novell customers to its routing platform.
Cisco has endorsed instead Microsoft's Acive Directory which pits it and Microsoft against Lucent and Novell in next generation router switches. Will Cisco lose customers as result of its choice? Check out what WSJ has to say on this.
Message 6066129
In part:
... "Cisco's use of Active Directory is a competitive issue for both Novell and Lucent," said Jamie Lewis, president of Burton Group, a market-research firm in Salt Lake City. Lucent's use of Novell Directory Services, or NDS, will help Novell gain ground before Active Directory hits the market. "This is probably the most important use of NDS so far," Mr. Lewis said.
Microsoft contends Active Directory will work better than NDS with some nonproprietary technologies that are becoming popular on the Internet. Eric Schmidt, Novell's chief executive, said that perception isn't true.
"We are competing with something that doesn't exist yet," Mr. Schmidt said of Active Directory. After the Microsoft product enters the market, he added, it will easier for customers to evaluate real data about the two products' performance.
The Lucent endorsement, while important strategically, doesn't have much immediate financial impact for Novell, Mr. Schmidt said. Lucent says it will start using NDS in high-end switching gear in the first half of 1999.
My understanding is that Cisco has thus far supported Novell's NDS, but it intends to no longer support it. This may be a strategic error for it lets Lucent make a grab for Cisco's customers who are now using Novell NDS. Does anyone care to speculate on how large a loss could this represent? Thanks.
Tulvio |
