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

To: ToySoldier who wrote (31093)	4/17/2000 8:42:00 PM
From: PJ Strifas	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 42771

An interesting perspective on CMGion. Persoanlly I think that if you are going to "paint" Novell as a Directory services pioneer, you don't have them trying to "end around" the competition... I always thought if you are the leader, the competition is looking to throw YOU off the top of the mountain. Goes to show you that image can be a valuable thing. (IMHO, product performance, reliability and scalibility will win out over marketing hype). Regards, Peter J Strifas ------------------------------------------- CMGion: Net-based safety in numbers PC Week April 16, 2000 9:00 PM PT URL: zdnet.com Talk about a return to the basics. As I was listening in on the CMGI/Novell/Sun phone conference last week regarding the CMGion worldwide data center service (I guess CMGI CEO David Wetherell won the coin toss to name the company), I was struck by the amount of retrenching going on in the industry. Maybe it is due to tech stocks falling off a cliff, but those companies were sounding familiar themes. Novell was built on a strong directory structure, developed at a time when few people cared about directories. After a long walk through the woods, Novell has figured out that its real strength lies in its directory expertise. The partnership with CMGI and Sun is Novell's attempt to make an end run around Microsoft, which is pushing its Active Directory technology as the core of Windows 2000. If the data center where you store and access your most valuable information is built on the Novell DENIM directory services, then you'd be wise to base all your directories on Novell. Sun sells big iron that scales and rarely crashes. Despite Scott McNealy's forays into stand-up comedy and free office suites, Sun's future depends on capitalizing on its heritage. If Sun can't be the box of choice for the data centers and application service providers of the future, its growth will be limited. And CMGI? It's a money machine and connection company. If you are allowed into the CMGI club, you get to play with all the companies under the ever-expanding Net umbrella. Of course, the member clearly missing from the club's announcement was Microsoft. While many analysts focused on the absence of the cache companies, such as Akamai, that are missing from the lineup, Microsoft was the real loser in the CMGion announcement. It needs these types of wins if it is going to prove that Windows 2000 is a scalable, reliable system that can reach all the way up to the data center level. This must be especially vexing to the execs in Redmond,since Microsoft owns a chunk of CMGI stock. Now that CMGion is the latest company to start up a data center operation, all it needs is customers. How fast corporate customers are ready to sign up for remote data operations and other Net services is the biggest question for investors edgy about their Web investments. My guess is that the rest of this year will be one of trial and beta testing of Net-based services. At a keynote panel I moderated last week at the AIIM show (www.aiim.org) in New York, I asked the 1,200 IT execs in the audience how many had signed up for an ASP or off-site service. About 50 audience members indicated they had signed up. How many were thinking about it? A lot more. And that gets back to the most basic of basics: trust. The CMGions and similar data hosts still have to build a warehouse of trust before customers sign up for a warehouse of data stored remotely.