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

To: DJBEINO who wrote (28740)	10/28/1999 8:26:00 AM
From: Spartex	Respond to of 42771

Novell, Microsoft Spar Over Directory Space (10/27/99, 3:01 p.m. ET) By Madeleine Acey, TechWeb LONDON -- Prepare yourself for the next big fight in the enterprise computing arena: directory services. Novell pulled on its boxing gloves Tuesday to attempt to deliver a blow against Microsoft over which company's offering was truly cross-platform. A Novell official said NDS was cross-platform and would cater to Linux, Solaris, Win NT, Macintosh, and OS2. It would also support Lotus Notes, Netscape, Oracle, Cisco, Lucent, and Apache products, according to Novell product strategist J.D. Marymee, who added that IBM had demonstrated it running on an OS 390 mainframe. He also said Microsoft's Active Directory could only be used as an enterprisewide directory service if a company's entire systems were Microsoft-based. Gary Hein, also a product strategist, said a Novell client for Win 2000 Professional would be available early next year providing full NDS access to Windows 2000 Professional desktops with Zenworks-based management of policy and applications. "We don't perceive Microsoft so much as our competitor as an opportunity to grow our directory market," Marymee said. He said Active Directory -- due out with Win 2000 in February -- would not be backwards-compatible. "For older platforms -- Windows 95 and 98, you can access Active Directory but you can't leverage the new technologies," Marymee said. He said Provo, Utah-based Novell recognized most companies had mixed environments. Microsoft Windows marketing manager Nick McGrath was incensed at Marymee's statements, and said Wednesday that the situation was actually the reverse -- that Novell's strategy was "rip and replace [with NDS] across all platforms." "The whole focus of Windows 2000 and Active Directory is one of respect for customers' existing implementations," he said. "There's already a directory services inside of Unix. The Novell inference is the Sun Solaris developers don't know how to develop directory services. I think those guys might take issue with that." He said Win 2000 would let users set up directory replication, linking to NDS without buying any new software. "We also have other products for integrating into the Unix environment," Marymee said. Hein also detailed Novell's DirXML middleware product to integrate multiple directories including Active Directory. "It's bi-directional," he said. "You can make changes in AD or NDS and changes will flow between the two." The XML conversion layer would take it out to ERP applications, Notes, Exchange, Netscape, and so forth. "We're open sourcing this," he added, and said it would be available in the first quarter of 2000. Novell had the upper hand in this argument, said Dan Kusnetzky, program director of IDC's operations environments and serverware division. "You could certainly make a case that the only platform Active Directory runs on is Windows 2000. Microsoft has no plans [publicly] to port to any other platform," he said. "They have announced they will collaborate with other LDAP-based products -- but that's not the same directory everywhere. NDS has been available since NetWare 4 [1993] -- it is cross platform and they can prove that. It exists running in very large networks worldwide -- not an architecture waiting to be released [like Active Directory]." The analyst also said he believed "Microsoft is trying very hard to enter the enterprise computer room, bringing along its previous desktop business model where the product is good enough to get by and cheaper than competitor's." However, he said, "The enterprise computer room is staffed by different people than those who make desktop decisions. They need reliability of the company as well as of the product. It's a very interesting race to see who can grab the most directory-enabled apps mindshare. Novell has the advantage -- they've got a product you can order." techweb.com +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Alright Novell, time to play hardball! Looking to sweep the directory "series" in 4 games! GO!