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

To: Marc Newman who wrote (23475)	8/13/1998 7:09:00 PM
From: EPS	Respond to of 42771

Good Luck Marc! Beta testers give Novell green light to ship NetWare 5.0 By Claudia Graziano, PC Week Online August 10, 1998 5:38 pm ET Bringing to a close its largest beta test program ever, Novell Inc. is finally ready to ship its next-generation operating system. NetWare 5.0 will be commercially available by Sept. 20, officials said in a press conference today. The operating system -- which is IP-based and features an integrated Java virtual machine -- will come with free copies of Oracle Corp.'s Oracle8 database and Netscape Communications Corp.'s FastTrack Web Server. Pricing for the operating system will start at $1,195 for a five-user license -- a $100 increase over the current version of NetWare. By contrast, pricing for rival Microsoft Corp.'s Windows NT Server and NT Server Enterprise Edition starts at $809 and $3,999, respectively, for five- and 25-user versions. Competitively pricing its operating system is one way Novell is hoping to get a leg up on Microsoft, which has fallen behind in its schedule to release NT Server 5.0. Originally promised for release by the end of this year, NT 5.0 -- which will feature Microsoft's first iteration of its enterprise directory services component, Active Directory-is now scheduled for release by mid-1999. "We have about 40 million customers using our directory services today," said Stewart Nelson, senior vice president for Novell's product development. "That's something our competitors can't claim." The majority of the 200 third-party applications that have been certified thus far to work with NetWare 5.0 also integrate with Novell Directory Services, Nelson said. But Novell is counting on the stability of its operating system to persuade customers to adopt NetWare 5.0 in lieu of waiting for Microsoft's NT. "We expect this to be a very tight, very stable product due to our massive beta and own internal production use," Nelson said. "We're about three or four months ahead of where we were with previous .0 releases." More than 300,000 beta copies of NetWare 5.0 have been shipped or downloaded since Novell initiated its NetWare 5.0 beta program last November, Nelson said. By comparison, Novell shipped approximately 20,000 beta copies of NetWare 4.11. "We would never have adopted a .0 version [of NetWare] before," said Chuck Ogden, network administrator for Utah State Hospital, in Provo, and a veteran NetWare user. Ogden said he is already planning to roll out NetWare 5.0 on the hospital's servers. "200,000 people are bound to do things a bit differently," he said of his confidence that the software has been thoroughly tested. For those who plan to wait before upgrading, Novell announced it will release an updated version of NetWare 4.10 next quarter that features year 2000 readiness enhancements. Novell (NOVL) of Provo, can be reached at www.novell.com. www8.zdnet.com:80/pcweek/news/0810/10enware.html