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

To: Don Earl who wrote (20539)	3/2/1998 5:26:00 PM
From: Jim McCormack	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 42771

NDS will "Gateway" to DEN This is a bit of a ramble - sorry in advance.... Novell is part of the working group so that IMHO they can have a gateway ready to connect the two systems. Same for Netscape who has a Directory Model based on LDAP. Look for LDAP to be the "Common ground between all" and for a features war to break out - the end result will be better products from all and cheaper prices for all. Seriously - Novell moved NDS into the public domain to enhance the attractiveness of it to developers. It hasn't sparked a flood of development IMHO as directory services are often misunderstood and much more complex then the "Market" defines them today. To allow you applications to be managed by a directory is a very strategic decision for developers and software vendors. A directory service is a vast complex entity. At the risk of over simplifying - Take all the major Database vendors products, Sybase, Oracle, Informix, SQL Server to name a few... These products all have a separate User Profile manager to register and admin rights for users on the databases they access. In a Directory Services environment that admin is done on a unified application for managing all objects and the rights and access associated with each. The same app that admins security and rights to printers and disk space etc... admins database access. A master Syscon - one that is hooked into and has ties to all applications and resources on the net. A very tall order and a very difficult proposition. All database vendors would have to write lots of new code to build the "Hooks" to all the Directory Service admin tool. This is a major pain. They have to keep the old user manager code and methods for those who don't have the Directory Service in place. A complete Directory Service is years away - It is a great idea, a great concept, but very difficult to get everyone to buy into. It will be an evolutionary journey that has to be independently managed by no one single vendor or it will never work out. The DS is too important for any vendor to control - NDS is like IPX - A proprietary standard moved into the open standards world too late to matter much. There is no TCP/IP yet in this analogy. MS and CSCO want to make DEN the TCPIP of directory services by running it through the standards process. This will take years - the C++ standard was just ratified this year - how long have we been using that! At any rate NDS is tagged right or wrong as proprietary like IPX and as such it has a tough road ahead to shake that image. Not too many vendors will allow a third party to control administration over the products they depend upon.... It will take time and a whole lot of trust to be sure the DS vendor doesn't leverage them in some way. I do not think NDS or DEN will be a huge success and find themselves widely implemented for this reason alone - It will take more time. This battle will unfold like a glacier race - progress will be slow and determining who is winning will be next to impossible - it will seem like a tie for most of the race and in the end the results of this race will seem unimportant and much less significant than they seem today. I see little long term value in NDS - it is a tactical advantage not a strategic advantage. Novell has used it as a tactical tool with NT very well - but it will have no strategic value as an open standards based directory with LDAP at its core will emerge to displace the proprietary NDS and DEN models IMO. Jim McCormack