ÿNovember 3, 1997
Novell Faces New Reality
Leveraging a venture with Netscape and a strategy that embraces NT, Novell is trying to get its huge installed NetWare base excited about the company
By Monua Janah with Stuart J. Johnston
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<Picture: T>housands of network administrators swear by Novell's NetWare, mainly for its stability and dependability. But Novell realizes it must adapt the file-and-print operating system for state-of-the-art applications-and articulate that direction to higher-level IS and business executives-if it is to keep its customers from the clutches of Microsoft and Windows NT Server.
That's why Novonyx, the Novell-Netscape Communications joint venture, is so important to Novell. Novonyx last week laid out a migration path for porting one of the industry's most advanced intranet-development environments-Netscape's SuiteSpot-to the world's largest server base-NetWare. Even if Novonyx only gives existing customers a reason to upgrade and add servers for the Internet era, Novell is assured a place in the heart of the enterprise for years to come, analysts say.
After years of trying to clobber Microsoft on its own turf, Novell is now trying to coexist with Microsoft, or exploit specific technical weaknesses. As for the former strategy, Novell is catering to companies such as Chase Manhattan Bank and Mitchell International with technology that makes it easier to slot NT desktops into NetWare environments. On the latter front, Novell is exploiting NT's lack of a directory and-via Novonyx-Microsoft's vulnerability on the Internet.
Dan Swatman, network administrator at Olympic Pipeline Co. in Renton, Wash., is testing the first two Novonyx products: Messaging Server and the FastTrack Web server. Also new from Novonyx is a test version of the enterprise-class Enterprise Pro Web server integrated with Oracle's database. It includes support for JavaScript.
Olympic Pipeline, which transports refined oil products, has five NetWare file-and-print servers and uses a Novell Web server for its intranet. "But we are looking to develop more heavy-duty applications, with database connectivity, so that clients across the WAN can access the database," Swatman says. "We need a product with more tools." Swatman is looking at Novonyx because he wants to stick with NetWare. But "until the Novonyx products ship next year, NT is also a possibility," he adds.
The Novonyx products also pull a new constituency into the Novell fold: intranet developers. Executives at CSG Interactive LLC, which designs and implements intranets, say the Novonyx Web server offers better security, a better search engine, and easier remote configuration and database integration than Novell's current Web server. "It's a pretty industrial-strength environment," says CSG president Paul Boyce. "People running Novell networks need something like this. We're going to get a lot of application development for this environment."
More Than Novonyx
Users are clinging to NetWare for more than the promise of Novonyx. For example, Novell this month is slated to ship NDS for NT, software that lets Novell Directory Services manage NT servers, and thus better integrate NT into NetWare environments. NDS for NT "is as important for the philosophical change it represents as for what it does," says Jamie Burton, president of consulting firm Burton Group in Midvale, Utah.
"If Novell continues to execute, NT becomes a cheap application server that can be integrated with a NetWare environment," Burton adds. "NT's not a threat to the infrastructure, as it was back when Novell was forcing people to choose between NetWare and NT."
Don Clark, manager of client-server networking at Foundation Health Systems in Woodland Hills, Calif., says NDS for NT has performed better than expected in beta tests. The company spends a lot of time administering its mixed-server environment, which includes about 200 NetWare 4.11 servers and 50 NT servers. By bringing NT servers under NDS administration, Clark says, he can free resources for other projects. "NDS has a decided technological advantage and a decided total-cost-of-ownership advantage," Clark says. "I'm waiting to see how Microsoft will respond."
Indeed, even without a native directory-expected with the release of NT 5.0 next year-Microsoft has converted droves of NetWare users since NT 4.0 arrived in August 1996.
One Microsoft convert is Richard Entrup, IS director at Wilson, Elser, Moskowitz, Edelman & Dicker, a New York law firm with 21 offices worldwide. Entrup, a former NetWare reseller and professed "Novell bigot," plans to move his firm to an all-Microsoft network-NT Server 4.0, NT Workstation on the desktop, and SQL Server database-in mid-1998, replacing NetWare 3.x.
Entrup says the firm chose NT over NetWare mainly because it's a better application server, and for integration with SQL Server and NT Workstation. "The decision wasn't based as much on a network operating system as on an overall strategy," Entrup says. "What differentiates NetWare from NT is its directory superiority, but we don't need a directory."
Adds Entrup: "I'd be the last person to give Microsoft accolades, but NT is inevitable."
While many senior executives are dictating NT Server because of these and other benefits, technical staffers-who must manage the stresses of uprooting a networking infrastructure-are beginning to make their resistance known. For one, they're telling senior management that the move to NT is costly. "Companies are spending a lot of money to get to the exact place they were before," says Jon Oltsik, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass. "A lot of the original decisions to go to NT were mandated by senior managers. But it's a difficult migration, and there has been a push back from the technical people."
Their success in persuading senior management has been mixed. "The Microsoft marketing engine is pulling everything along," says John Pawluk, supervisor of distributed technology services at a Midwest agribusiness conglomerate. "Whether it's a good decision or a bad one, there's so much hype that everybody is going to Microsoft anyway."
Pawluk's group migrated from NetWare 3.x to NetWare 4.11, and "everybody is happy with that," he says. But in other groups at the company, NT is replacing NetWare. "People are going in blindly, not realizing the can of worms they are opening up," Pawluk says. "From an application-server perspective, the NT box might be OK. But for file and print, it's slower and not as scalable. I don't think the boxes are production-hardened for the enterprise."
There are other pitfalls in implementing and running NT-based networks, users say. Among their concerns: complicated network security and a high frequency of crashes.
Novell is looking to capitalize on those and other weaknesses while also playing off Microsoft's desktop strengths. Novell's Workstation Manager, for instance, lets customers manage NT workstations from within Novell's directory, so NetWare servers can thrive within the Microsoft desktop environment.
The high ownership costs of NT Server and the flexibility offered by Workstation Manager were key to a recent decision by Chase Manhattan's global banking operation to stay with its 30 to 35 NetWare servers. In November 1996, the Chase operation had decided to switch to NT Server, and to put an NT domain in place, to support the NT workstations it had ordered for high-powered trading applications. But after looking at "accessibility, speed, and cost issues," Chase installed NDS and Workstation Manager instead, says C.V. Srinivasa, PC technology manager at the group.
If it had gone with Microsoft, Chase would have needed to spend a lot to place domain controllers-NT servers that authenticate NT domains-in every site worldwide. Otherwise, it would have had to tolerate slow performance as users tried to authenticate to the primary domain controller across the WAN, Srinivasa says.
Also, Chase would have had to migrate several applications to NT from NetWare, including in-house apps for foreign-exchange trading. Chase's IT team decided that staying with NDS and using Workstation Manager to manage the desktops made more sense.
"Our challenge was to introduce the new desktop operating system without necessarily redoing our whole infrastructure," says Antonio Di Caro, VP of systems service for Chase's global markets group. "With what we have deployed, we have managed to achieve both our goals, which were to give our traders more power but not break the bank."
Adds Brian Slater, Chase's senior VP of global markets technology, "The trading floor's technical infrastructure represents the latest state of the art and forms the basis for how we build the environment for the rest of the business." The standard for all of Chase is now NetWare servers and NT workstations.
The business arguments for consolidating on a single server platform often outweigh the reasoning to keep NetWare, analysts say. But many companies are surprisingly resistant to this line of thinking.
Mitchell International, a publishing company in San Diego, is bringing in NT but plans to keep the company's NetWare and Unix servers. "It's a question of using the right tool for the job," says David Smith, senior network systems analyst. "When it's a big business, with hundreds of millions of dollars involved, three operating systems are just fine, maybe four. Investing in good people pays off better than a neat row of identical servers."
For many IS executives, a bigger issue than technology is vendor financial stability. Novell is coming off several weak quarters, posting a $122 million loss for its most recent quarter. Analysts don't expect a strong rebound for at least a year.
This isn't lost on managers at the Hartford, a multinational insurance company whose five autonomous divisions decide themselves whether to stick with NetWare or move to NT. The insurer's commercial group already has switched 100 NetWare servers to NT, leading the other divisions to consider similar moves, says Mark Woodward, enterprise architect in distributed systems at the Hartford.
"There's still NetWare, but it's diminishing unless the Novell brain trust figures out a way to rescue the company," Woodward says. "They didn't pay enough attention to their customers for years." Adds law firm IS director Entrup, "I don't have the warm and cozies about Novell right now because there is a business question: What is Novell's future?"
It's a considerably brighter future if partnerships like Novonyx inspire NetWare customers, and if Novell can execute on its strategy to provide infrastructure products for mixed networks. Otherwise, Novell may become just another also-ran in the competition with Microsoft.
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