Toy, Any surprises here? Maybe that it took so long to announce?!?
Cisco and Novell will
collaborate on Novell Directory
Services
By Scott Berinato, PC Week Online
November 18, 1998 12:04 AM ET
LAS VEGAS--It's not the deal, but it is a
deal.
After months of negotiation, Cisco Systems
Inc. and Novell Inc. are expected to
announce at Comdex here Wednesday that
they will work together to integrate Novell
Directory Services (NDS) with Cisco
networking hardware, according to sources
close to the companies.
To underscore the commitment, the
companies will demonstrate at Novell's
Comdex booth a new technology that
enables NDS to store networking hardware
configurations in the directory and
automatically distribute those configurations
to any network device by way of a Java
applet.
Cisco (Nasdaq:CSCO) will not license
NDS as part of the deal, as many users
were hoping. But the companies have
agreed that any extensions made for Cisco
products in the standard Directory Enabled
Networking (DEN) schema will be made
available to Novell (Nasdaq:NOVL) to
apply to NDS, sources close to Cisco said. This will enable NDS to
fully manage DEN-enabled Cisco hardware.
Sources said the Novell partnership does not affect Cisco's
development of Cisco Networking Services for Active Directory
(CNS/AD), forthcoming software services that are based on Microsoft's
directory service, which is due as part of Windows 2000 next year.
Novell and Cisco have not set a target date for releasing their
yet-to-be-named technology.
Sources said it will become a satellite product orbiting NetWare 5,
similar to the Border Manager and Zen Works packages. Novell may
also offer the technology to networking companies to resell with their
equipment, sources said.
Novell, of Provo, Utah, has made no secret of its desire to partner with
Cisco, of Mountain View, Calif. IT managers that use both Novell and
Cisco products have been waiting for a deal, as well, so they can use
their NDS directory for managing and setting network policy on Cisco
hardware.
Users wanted Cisco to license NDS, as it had already done with
Microsoft's Active Directory. Because of vendor-specific extensions to
standard directory schema, users believed integration would be difficult
without a licensing deal for the technology. The companies' agreement to
work together on schema extensions is meant to address this concern.
As it pursued a deal with Cisco, Novell was aggressively signing up
other NDS licensees, including Cisco competitors Lucent Technologies
Inc. and Nortel Networks. Sources said the deals were as much about
putting pressure on Cisco as they were about extending NDS' reach.
Officials at both Cisco and Novell declined to comment on the expected
announcement.
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