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

To: P. Ramamoorthy who wrote (28027)	9/8/1999 11:39:00 AM
From: Paul Fiondella	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42771

Insider sales These sales are not just a matter of confidence in the company. One could easily see Slitz selling in advance of his departure. One sees no selling on the part of Schmidt. It may very well reflect more on the question of who is going to be around Novell for the long term than upon the company itself. Don't let NOVL's current price fool you. The news I posted today shows Novell firmly committed to an ecommerce strategy that makes sense. It has embraced and put itself squarely in the middle of all of the standards committees involved in internet data interchange. Each day that goes by shows that identity security based on directory technology is at the core of effective ecommerce. Only Novell has a directory system that can be deployed to address the security issues of ecommerce today. All of the other non-directory or meta-directory solutions involve a hodgepodge of distributed databases to confirm individual identity. When people see how weak MSFT's AD is they will also understand Novell's strength in this area. As was recently pointed out, most of these databases cannot even report an order to the inventory system let alone assure security for a monetary transaction over the internet. Compare this to NDS based transactions. Novell's mission now is to demonstrate it can make a digitalme solution work for the consumer. I expect them to go forward soon on this. Moreover I do not think Schmidt will sit by and watch any failure to execute spiral. Slitz was an eye opener for the marketing management at Novell. They are going to do everything possible to prove they can make digitalme a success. We have a distinct possibility that end users will drive digitalme and the whole company in the right direction for the first time since Norda smelled consumer demand but couldn't pick the right way forward. Too much excitement will be associated with success for the good ole boys to foul up the works. If Novell executes on ecommerce directory technology, long term investors in this company are going see a growth pattern unlike any they have seen before. Count me among them.