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

To: DJBEINO who wrote (23502)	8/18/1998 10:02:00 AM
From: Spartex	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42771

DJ, Notice the "key" factors that make an upgrade to NW5.0 so compelling to businesses (NDS and ZENworks, along with cost of ownership). Businesses today have such tight margins, it makes sense for them to acknowledge the value (cost of ownership) of Novell's solutions today. Regards, QuadK (Print 08/17/98) NetWare 5.0 ready a month early Laura DiDio computerworld.com By shipping its NetWare 5.0 operating system a month ahead of schedule, Novell, Inc. is giving some of its customers another weapon in their year 2000 upgrade arsenals- and also bolstering the business case for NetWare. Several of the new features make a compelling case for upgrading to NetWare 5.0, according to eight users interviewed by Computerworld last week. Those features include an updated version of Novell Directory Services (NDS), native TCP/IP and bundled entry-level versions of Oracle Corp.'s Oracle8 database and the Zenworks management utility. "Getting NetWare 5.0 ahead of time means that I should be able to complete the upgrade of my 89 NetWare 4.x servers in a nine-state area within three months," said James Graham, network architect at BellSouth Business Systems, Inc. in Atlanta. "This is crucial since the year 2000 upgrade is looming, and we expect to devote all of 1999 to year 2000 issues." a migration headache Not all users were as optimistic. Sharon Pryor, manager of network services at The Toro Co. in Minneapolis, said her company is sticking with NetWare 4.11 until its year 2000 issues are resolved. "We have looked at NetWare 5.0 - and it looks like it will bring some nice features to the table - but it's a big migration. And we've got more than enough on our plates with year 2000," Pryor said. For BellSouth Business Services, the lure of NetWare 5.0's advanced feature set - particularly NDS and Zenworks - offers enough of a business case to migrate now. Those functions, Graham said, tipped the scales in favor of NetWare vs. Microsoft Corp.'s Windows NT Server. BellSouth Business Systems uses NT as an application server but has rejected it as an enterprise network operating system because the domain directory model just doesn't work well in the wide area. Also, the cost of ownership is too high, Graham bsaid. "A move to Windows NT would mean tripling my support staff, and I'd have to upgrade a lot of equipment. By contrast, NetWare 5.0, since it has just 10 million lines of code, can run on a 486 server with 64M bytes of RAM," he said. "The upgrade costs to convert to NT would be incredible: $15,000 to $20,000 per server, and we'd have to upgrade at least 20 of our servers," Graham said. Robert De Cardenas, network coordinator at the Florida Supreme Court in Tallahassee, agreed. He has been beta-testing NetWare 5.0 since early spring and cited its lower total cost of ownership, native TCP/IP and NDS as compelling reasons the court chose a NetWare upgrade over a migration to NT. "It costs us about 20% less to own and manage NetWare than it would to move to NT," De Cardenas said. Bob Sakakeeny, an analyst at Aberdeen Group, Inc. in Boston, said he estimates a "30% to 40% cost increment associated with managing NT domain directories. The time and resources presently needed to configure and manage NT for the enterprise are prohibitive. This includes the cost of adding servers, network management personnel, new switches and routers."