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Technology Stocks : Novell (NOVL) dirt cheap, good buy? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Steve Fancy who wrote (27659)	8/11/1999 1:32:00 AM
From: DJBEINO	Respond to of 42771

Indispensable Novell Posted by: siteadm Date posted: Fri Aug 6 16:05:32 PDT 1999 If Novell has its way, a company that is closely identified with networking plumbing is going to become a strategic business partner. At the core of that proposition is an assumption that as Web-based computing begins to scale up and become more complex, directories such as Novell Directory Services will become indispensable. This is because the network services needed to secure networks and authenticate users require too much horsepower to efficiently run on the client. At the same time, running that class of software on back-end servers is too inefficient. In effect, this means that a separate tier of front-end servers needs to emerge in order to authenticate users and provide the security needed to safely conduct transactions and share information. For IT organizations, this means that Novell has the potential to become the arbiter of network services between any number of disparate clients and a wide range of servers running Unix, Windows NT, Linux, and a host of other platforms. The good news for Novell is that no other vendor, especially after Sun's recent alliance with Netscape, is well-positioned to be an independent provider of these services across a wide range of heterogeneous systems. The bad news is that most of Novell's vision of computing is still largely theoretical; most corporate IT sites are still a long way from really exploiting the power of the directory. In fact, Novell's primary short-term strategy is simply to try to seed the market by getting system vendors of every stripe and Internet service providers of any kind to embed the Novell directory in their products and services. Once that's accomplished, Novell hopes that the inherent value of directories will become so apparent that it will have essentially created a de facto standard. The question is: Can Novell really pull this off, or has it fallen too far off the radar screen to really be considered a strategic partner? forums.infoworld.com