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

To: George Papadopoulos who wrote (19409)	1/6/1998 7:23:00 PM
From: George Papadopoulos	Respond to of 42771

Novell Stabilizes NetWare With Java Middleware January 5, 1998 By Judy DeMocker Novell revealed its strategy for recasting NetWare as a reliable platform for Internet applications, including e-commerce, at Fall Internet World in New York last month. The Open Solutions Architecture is the company's effort to provide a stable architecture for third-party software vendors, such as Oracle and Netscape, to port or develop Internet applications. But NetWare has had little penetration in the application server market so far, in large part due to an application hosting difficulty referred to as the Ring Zero problem. Applications run on NetWare as NetWare Loadable Modules (NLMs) and run close to the kernel, which can destabilize and crash the operating system. Novell has sidestepped this problem by using WebLogic's Tengah server, a middleware layer written in Java. "Having a Java server running on NetWare is like Novell's 'Get out of Jail Free' card," said Bob Pasker, chief architect and founder of WebLogic, San Francisco. "People didn't want to write NLM applications, because it tied them to NetWare, and because of the Ring Zero issue, which had the potential to cause some negative interactions with the kernel." Paskar said Tengah insulates the kernel from the applications, which run in the server's Java virtual machine. Tengah also lets developers create applications without writing them as NLMs. Novell hopes to leverage its existing base in large corporate enterprises, and its Network Directory Services (NDS), to provide network services and management capabilities across multiple platforms. "We can provide better domain services for NT than Microsoft can," said Chris Stone, senior vice president of corporate strategy at Novell. "We're in the game, folks." Microsoft is currently working on providing central directory services with Active Directory, which will support LDAP and will ship with Windows NT 5.0 late next year. Novell partners Oracle and Novonyx announced they are porting their server applications to NetWare, including Netscape SuiteSpot, Oracle Application Server, and Oracle8. Novell offers a beta of a development kit for creating applications that use Open Solutions Architecture APIs. The company is also evolving a database connectivity strategy to enable connection with other database vendors' software.