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

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To: Paul Fiondella who wrote (25200)1/28/1999 2:41:00 PM
From: ToySoldier  Read Replies (2) of 42771
 
Novell has to accomplish two major goals in order for Novell to take a Leadership role in the Directory Services technology.

1. They have to educate the Industry on what Directory Services
really is and what value a true, mature, and heterogenious
"Keystone" DS can can provide an organization in the form of
addressing both Business and Technology issues. (This is still
a major issue but progress has occurred in the industry regarding
awareness of the value of a DS over the past few months).

2. Novell has to show the industry a critical mass of examples that
demonstrates how NDS is the only "Keystone" DS in the industry
that can deliver on the promises that were harped on in the
first goal. Last year Novell made great strides to demonstrating
how NDS can be leveraged in many of the Network Infrastructure
technology which organizations require internally. This year
Novell has to extend the NDS value proposition to the Extranet
and Internet arena. Digital Me is the first Major ZEN to show
this value proposition. The other 9 ZENs or more will continue
to build the needed critical mass of NDS enabled applications
so that NDS will be entrenched as the head&shoulder leader in
the DS arena before Active Directory gets to start its teething
stage late this year or likely early next year.

Can't be done with the installed Netware base. Can't be done with PR campaigns and huff and puff. Can't be done by "getting focused". Can't be done by decree.

I cant completely agree with you on this statement. I would agree
that there is no one strategy that accomplishes the goals stated
above, but all of the points you mentioned combined with ones you
didnt mention are required to entrench NDS as the clear leader in
the DS arena. There is no one magic bullet. Like it was mentioned
several times last week "DS is Rocket Science" and a lot of effort
in many avenues will have to be pursued in order for Novell to
attain its goal of being the DS leader in the industry.

I will also disagree with you that NDS was a priority with Novell
well before Schmidt. Although NDS was considered important before
Schmidt arrived on the scene (and the Evil Development Engineers
that you seem not to respect knew the value of NDS well before any
other entity knew of its value), there was no clear NDS priority
within Novell. It was mixed up with NetWare priorities,
Groupwise, UnixWare, etc. In fact, I will say that there was a
very clear change of priority from NetWare and other priorities to
NDS in 1998. In fact, after the NetWare 5 official release, Novell turned on the NDS priority to a level that it was clear NO OTHER
PRIORITY WAS MORE IMPORTANT! That intensity is growing even more
at Novell and I agree whole-heartedly with what I see happening.

Novell is not an Internet leader in the eyes of the Industry. In
fact, Novell still is not on the Internet Vendor radar screens
because Novell has not yet demonstrated how their Internet-Ready
technology can be used to address E-Commerce and Internet service
portal solutions. Digital Me will be the first of I hope many
NDS enabled E-Commerce and Internet services. Hopefully Slitz is
reading messages like ours and realizing that E-Commerce MUST BE
A STRATEGIC PRIORITY NOW - although not the only priority.

Novell has also begun targetting the ERP slant of NDS-enablement
which is equally important to win over and entrench the Enterprise
customer which is still Novell's largest revenue target customer
by far. Novell's re-developed Consulting Services group has been
building a large inventory of ERP type resources to make a mindshare
stamp on the ERP arena. If you dont believe this then go look at
the Novell web site under employment opportunities and see what the
most demanded postion/skill is that Novell is looking for.

Thats all I have to say about that - but I have a fear that you will
again find something wrong with this posting as well. So somehow
I expect that I will have to be clarifying my statements pretty soon.

Lets hope not.

Toy
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