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

To: The Coz who wrote (27990)	9/3/1999 5:51:00 PM
From: PJ Strifas	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42771

Hello! In that scenario perhaps Intel would be more interested in grabbing some companies who will be/are designed and manufacturing the new chips or supporting chipsets for that type of technology. Or even companies providing supporting hardware for networked appliances like motherboards, expansion boards or even other device specific hardware like PC Cards, next generation Input/Output sub-systems etc. See, what is meant by making hardware NDS-aware is that some hardware (no all) has built-in software mechinisms. If a company were to take their software and make it capable of using NDS information, it would enhance the product greatly. This is what CSCO, LU, Nortel et al are doing right now with some/all of their products. It's rather nice to see they are at least starting to realize the potential in NDS. We will start to see more interesting interations of hardware which will greatly change the way some devices work because of NDS. Things like switches and routers for example and even voice communications can add policy-based management features which would be well out of the scope of what is being done today. Also, what Compaq and Dell (and NEC) are doing is creating function-specific "servers" which are dubbed network appliances. These machines still function in the same manner in which a regular NetWare server would only that it's been optimized for a specific function (web caching) and to the hardware which it's built upon. I'm sure things like PBXs and voice switching circuits as well as routers could benefit from NDS as well. Now, I'm not saying that it's a definite NO answer to Intel moving in and acquiring NOVL for the NDS technology but think of the price tag! NOVL's market cap alone would be far above their $1 Billion range of acquisitions. When you factor in a premium for buying a company of Novell's size it could prove inhibiting. Right now, it would be more prudent to license NDS, create or enhance their products with NDS in mind and WHEN these NDS-enabled products begin to become more prevalent (from many vendors) then Novell will become the Golden Goose. See, NDS becomes the key to making disparate networking equipment interoperable thereby making NDS indispensible. At that stage, Novell's price tag becomes much more palatable to many of these larger hardware companies like CSCO and/or Intel. For them to go in a buy out Novell now would be a great leap of faith that other vendors would continue to develop their products with NDS capabilities. Or that they could woo other vendors into joining in with them via strategic partnerships/alliances to co-develop NDS interoperability. Peter J Strifas