Novell (NOVL) dirt cheap, good buy? Message Board

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

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To: Loring who wrote (25206)	1/28/1999 5:12:00 PM
From: ToySoldier	Read Replies (2) of 42771

Loring, you are correct in the purely technical sense. The problem is that Novell's NDS lead in Mindshare is not entrenched and without clear mindshare entrenchment, Novell is still very vunerable in losing its current marketshare if and when Active Directory releases. Also, Netscape's Directory Service (although much more limiting than NDS) is still grabbing mindshare. Mindshare is very very critical. If Novell can entrench the Mindshare in the Industry media and the Industry players then it will be very difficult for any of NDS's competitors to gain much ground in the future. And one other very big point - NOVELL CANNOT EVER REST ON ITS LEAD!! Novell has got to consider NDS to be chasing a leader (even though they are the leader). This is currently their mentality. NDS is on current revision 5 and with the upcoming release of SCADS (or Novell keeps correcting me that it is SKADS - meaning Scaleable Kick Ass Directory Services) Novell will leave even its current NDS revision in the dust! Another future release will likely unbuckle the current BTrieve Datastore component of NDS from the core functionality of NDS. This will further scale and enhance NDS's capabilities because they can leverage a Relational DBMS like Oracle or even MSFT's SQLServer as a Datastore. But you are right in that technically NDS is light years ahead of its nearest competitor Netscape. Active Directory (if and when it arrives on the market) will be 5+ years behind NDS's current release of functionality and only be able to provide about 20% of what is considered to be the Eutopia of a Keystone DS. A Novell DS Consultant last week estimated that NDS is currently at about 75% of DS Eutopia. So unfortunately for many IT Decision-makers that have been brainwashed into thinking that MSFT's AD will release as a on-par competitor to current NDS, they will get a very rude awakening! The only technology that unfortunately waters down Novell's ability to force a customer to commit to NDS are the Meta-Directory players. They give many of the IT Decision-Makers the excuse to sit on the fence and wait until Active Directory shows up. But on the positive side, those same meta-directory players will also prevent MSFT from grabbing any significant Marketshare based on the "I better use MSFT AD because otherwise MSFT will isolate me" theory. This is a complex theory, but the summary is that Novell has a good lead but they have a lot of work to complete THIS YEAR to ensure that NDS entrenches the leadership role in DS. Hope that makes sense. Toy

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