Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: RIT who wrote (36508)	5/10/2001 2:07:12 PM
From: PJ Strifas	Respond to of 42771

From your response I'm inferring that Novell will get some information on who the end user (customer) is so making the leap to "selling into that account" would not be impossible. The reason I infer this is because I actually DON'T know what Novell is doing but understanding the process/principle behind licensing software - there are some facts that are not assumptions. For instance I develop a product for intranet services based on eDirectory and my customer has less than 250,000 objects in the tree (assume the customer did NOT have any directory services to start) - they can use eDirectory for FREE only for my product. At some time prior to this project "going live", the customer will need to contact Novell to obtain a "key" (license) to use eDirectory. During that process, the customer must supply some "contact" information (name, address, etc). Novell gathers this information and of course enters it into its database (to maintain information on key/license info they distribute so no duplicates are given out). Novell discovers that this "customer" does not have an existing entry in their database (therefore a new customer) and being the savvy company they are, they immediately dispatch a few Sales Engineers with a Consultant or two as a means of introducing themselves. During this process, these fine folks from Novell show the customer ZENworks, BorderManager, Novell Portal Services, iChain, etc just in case they didn't know about those products as well as a few solutions such as Single-Sign On, Authentication Services (digital keys/cards), Document Management/GroupWare, etc. I wonder how developers would feel about this.....then again, another rather successful company has been doing this for YEARS with great success so I doubt it would be a "bad" thing :) The key would be how savvy and aggressive Novell will be in moving in this direction and how many developers will actually leverage eDirectory in their products for Novell to take advantage. I can say this much, last year I had the opportunity to work with a company that was build internet access devices (namely a Metro Area Optical Switch). They developed a management piece that allowed administrators the ability to delegate authority over parts or segments of the product and the services it rendered. They build the management piece atop of an Oracle database (with a Java front end) from scratch. What they really needed was eDirectory and ZENworks for Networks to develop their management piece on! Anyway - thanks for the insight :) I need to get back to working on a few NDS issues right now :) Regards, Peter J Strifas