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

To: DJBEINO who wrote (23741)	9/5/1998 6:35:00 PM
From: EPS	Respond to of 42771

Picking Up Speed The dark horse in the race is Novell, which claims its GroupWise messaging system is picking up market share from the cc:Mail installed base, especially among companies that run cc:Mail on its NetWare operating system. The company said last week that it has sold 2.5 million GroupWise licenses this year, bringing its total installed base to 13 million. Last week, Novell shipped GroupWise 5.5, which adds document management, calendaring and scheduling enhancements, and native Internet addressing. Meijer Inc., a $7 billion grocery chain in Grand Rapids, Mich., will roll out the package to 16,000 users by year's end. Previously, the company used IBM's Profs, and it considers the GroupWise feature set a good replacement. "GroupWise provided for 98% of our needs right out of the box," says Jason McLellan, team leader and technical specialist at the company. newsvest.com he solution includes IBM Corp. Netfinity 3000 servers, Digi International's Digi Datafire Sync/570 adapters and Novell Inc.'s BorderManager FastCache and is available as a single-configured SKU for under $6,000 to the end user. The solution is significant for Internet service providers (ISPs) and Web enabled businesses, said Roy Appelbaum, Tech Data's vice president of networking product marketing. "The solution is an optimized server that allows a corporate intranet or the World Wide Web to have very fast access and improved performance time," he said. The solution lowers bandwidth costs as an alternative to upgrading overburdened servers, said Patrick Harr, FastCache product manager at Novell. He said caching eases traffic by allowing only the first user demanding a page to go to the Internet for the data. All other users get the information from the local system, where it was stored after the first user's request. "It brings the data closer to the user and gets rid of bandwidth bottlenecking. The next user receives the information at LAN speeds, as opposed to Internet speeds." The Netfinity 3000 server has an Intel Corp. processor and customers can configure the solution for Unix, Windows NT or NetWare networks. The DataFire adapters connect the server to Frame Relay and leased-line services at T1/E1 speeds without requiring a separate router. The BorderManager FastCache software can process 4,055 hits per second, or 350 million a day, said Mindcraft Inc., a research firm in Los Gatos, Calif. The customer controls the amount of time the information is stored, said Harr. "FastCache reads that time-to-live tag, and when it's expired, the next user goes out and refreshes it." He said dynamic information, news updates and stock quotes for example, are not stored locally, but other data like background art is cacheable. "Ninety-percent of the data you find on the Internet is cacheable." The solution is more than just throwing three products together, said Bill Oakes, Novell's director of alliance marketing. "Anyone can go out and buy an IBM server, a Digi card and FastCache and throw all together. But they need to know what they're doing. This delivers a complete solution. It's pure plug-and-play. Customers overwhelmed with network meltdown are looking for something to bring in that they can turn on and have up and running right away." newsvest.com

To: DJBEINO who wrote (23741)	9/5/1998 6:37:00 PM
From: EPS	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42771

Greenspan Indicates Fed Dropped Bias Toward Tightening at August Meeting Dow Jones Newswires WASHINGTON -- Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan all but confirmed that the central bank abandoned its bias toward tightening at its last policy-setting meeting and admonished fellow central bankers to weigh carefully the ramifications of recent financial market turmoil. In a speech Friday at the University of California at Berkeley, Mr. Greenspan suggested that the U.S. can't escape the turmoil and pressures of the international marketplace "It is just not credible that the United States can remain an oasis of prosperity unaffected by a world that is experiencing greatly increased stress," Mr. Greenspan said. "Developments overseas have contributed to holding down prices and aggregate demand in the United States in the face of strong domestic spending. As dislocations abroad mount, feeding back on our financial markets, restraint is likely to intensify," Mr. Greenspan said. In his most explicit reference to the Federal Open Market Committee's deliberations, Mr. Greenspan indicated that the FOMC abandoned its bias toward tightening at its most recent session. The minutes from that meeting have not yet been made available. "In the spring and early summer, the Federal Open Market Committee was concerned that a rise in inflation was the primary threat to the continued expansion of the economy," Mr. Greenspan said. "By the time of the Committee's August meeting, the risks had become balanced, and the Committee will need to consider carefully the potential ramifications of ongoing developments since that meeting." While indicating that pressures on the economy were "balanced," Mr. Greenspan restated the need for vigilance on inflation. "To be sure, labor markets are unusually tight, and we should remain concerned that pressures in these markets could spill over to costs and prices. But to date, they have not." Mr. Greenspan raised several questions about the rationality of assumptions of securities analysts, and thereby indirectly questioned the level of stock prices based on such assumptions. "Security analysts' recent projected per-share earnings growth of more than 13% over the next three to five years is unlikely to materialize," Mr. Greenspan said. "It would imply an ever increasing share of profit in the national income from a level that is already high by historic standards," Mr. Greenspan said. "Such conditions have led in the past to labor market pressures that thwarted further profit growth." Mr. Greenspan restated a quip in which he chided markets for looking for earnings too far into the future, even in an atmosphere of near price stability and reduced threat of inflation. "Current claims on a source of income available 20 or 30 years in the future still have current value. But should claims on the hereafter?" Mr. Greenspan asked. High equity market values relative to income and production also increase potential for economic swings and should give people reason for "caution," Mr. Greenspan said. "Since equity values are demonstrably more variable than incomes, when equity market values become large relative to incomes and GDP, their fluctuations can be expected to affect GDP more than when equity market values are low," Mr. Greenspan said. "Clearly, the history of large swings in investor confidence and equity premiums for rational and other reasons counsels caution in the current context," Mr. Greenspan said. "We have learned in recent weeks that just as a bull stock market feels unending and secure as an economy and stock market move forward, so it can feel when markets contract that recovery is inconceivable. Both, of course, are wrong," Mr. Greenspan said. "The immediate cause of the economic breakdown [in Asia] was an evident pulling back from future commitments" where the emergence of excess worldwide capacity in semiconductors may have been a triggering event, he said. "The process became self-feeding as disengagement from future commitments led to still greater disruption and uncertainty, rising risk premiums and discount factors, and a sharp fall in production," Mr. Greenspan said. In contrast, expectations played a generally more positive role in the U.S. where "the rise in stock prices also meant a fall in the equity cost of capital that doubtless raised the pace of new capital investment," Mr. Greenspan said. Higher stock prices also reduced the cost of capital. "Coupled with the quickened pace of productivity growth, wage and benefit moderation has kept growth in unit labor costs subdued in the current expansion. this has both damped inflation and allowed profit margins to reach high levels," Mr. Greenspan said. But even virtues can become a vice, he noted. Japan has had savings and investment rates far higher than those in the U.S., but its per capita growth potential now "appears to be falling relative to ours," he said. "This phenomenon of over investment is observable even among more sophisticated free market economies .... It is arguable that their hobbled financial system is, at least in part, a contributor to their economies' subnormal performance," he said.