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

To: zwolff who wrote (30942)	4/6/2000 12:47:00 PM
From: zwolff	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 42771

I see..so much for a relief rally..(at least we are not going down guys..) I have not done the calculation but I think that since MSFT was legally found to have violated antitrust laws NOVL went down more % wise than MSFT.. This is an old* interview with Drew Major, right before the launching of ICS.. novell.com NEW PRODUCT: INTERNET CACHING SYSTEM One of Major's latest projects that fits into that vision is the Novell Internet Caching System (ICS). Announced at BrainShare '99 in March and demonstrated by Major in his keynote address there, ICS is software that dramatically speeds access to Internet sites and expands the capacity of web servers. ICS is packaged and sold like an appliance: you plug it into any network and it starts working right away. I asked Major about the niche that ICS fills. "The internet needs caching big time," he said. "When things like audio and video come on, the amount of data being pumped and the amount of storage going online is going to expand exponentially. And because we can do it many times better than general purpose platforms, we have great opportunities just around that." But the way Major described it, caching is just a means to an end. "Caching is the foundation piece," he said. "The real value is the solutions you build on it." One solution is to couple the cache with a network directory like Novell Directory Services (NDS). NDS's power is that it maintains user information and manages authentication and access. It helps answer the need for controlling individual identity on the vastly expanding Internet. Working together with a proxy cache, NDS can enable a whole new class of services and conveniences. Major described a situation that could be alleviated by this powerful combination of identity and caching. "Today you've got 20 web sites, you've got 20 user names, and you've got 20 passwords. And you go to every one of them and you got to give your credit card to them. What if your ISP (Internet service provider) could do all the billing for you, like a 900 number on the telephone? What if premium content on the Internet is available via the same thing? You go to different sites and you subscribe and you don't have to fill out that long form yet again." Major believes that the next level of the Internet will have solutions like that. "I personally believe that the Internet today was driven by browsers, common protocols, and Web servers, and the fact that there was this dumb, almost telephone like switch in the middle called TCP/IP routing," he explained. "And to get to the next wave, the next level, there needs to be more intelligence in the middle, via caching and other things, and more identity in the middle." NOVELL'S OPPORTUNITY And where does Novell fit in? "That whole play is our opportunity," he said. "It's huge. It's around our core competencies, it has great upside, and we've got the best technology today for it. And with this appliance packaging, which we're doing with the proxy cache and we'll probably extend to other services later, we have ways of getting into this market without having to sell NetWare. The proxy cache appliance is the first attempt to get into that space. And from all indications, it's going to be a big hit." Entering new markets is Major's personal challenge, but it doesn't mean he?or Novell as a whole?is departing from its core competencies. "I'm not going outside of our roots," he asserted. "Everything we do with the appliance, we're leveraging the core technologies. We're just taking them into new markets by packaging them differently. Can you think of a better play, a better way of growing? And then you couple that with the explosion of the Internet, the explosion of the need for caching and identity, and how well-positioned we are there. All that is very synergistic with what we've got already."