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

To: Paul Fiondella who wrote (25200)	1/28/1999 2:41:00 PM
From: ToySoldier	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 42771

Novell has to accomplish two major goals in order for Novell to take a Leadership role in the Directory Services technology. 1. They have to educate the Industry on what Directory Services really is and what value a true, mature, and heterogenious "Keystone" DS can can provide an organization in the form of addressing both Business and Technology issues. (This is still a major issue but progress has occurred in the industry regarding awareness of the value of a DS over the past few months). 2. Novell has to show the industry a critical mass of examples that demonstrates how NDS is the only "Keystone" DS in the industry that can deliver on the promises that were harped on in the first goal. Last year Novell made great strides to demonstrating how NDS can be leveraged in many of the Network Infrastructure technology which organizations require internally. This year Novell has to extend the NDS value proposition to the Extranet and Internet arena. Digital Me is the first Major ZEN to show this value proposition. The other 9 ZENs or more will continue to build the needed critical mass of NDS enabled applications so that NDS will be entrenched as the head&shoulder leader in the DS arena before Active Directory gets to start its teething stage late this year or likely early next year. Can't be done with the installed Netware base. Can't be done with PR campaigns and huff and puff. Can't be done by "getting focused". Can't be done by decree. I cant completely agree with you on this statement. I would agree that there is no one strategy that accomplishes the goals stated above, but all of the points you mentioned combined with ones you didnt mention are required to entrench NDS as the clear leader in the DS arena. There is no one magic bullet. Like it was mentioned several times last week "DS is Rocket Science" and a lot of effort in many avenues will have to be pursued in order for Novell to attain its goal of being the DS leader in the industry. I will also disagree with you that NDS was a priority with Novell well before Schmidt. Although NDS was considered important before Schmidt arrived on the scene (and the Evil Development Engineers that you seem not to respect knew the value of NDS well before any other entity knew of its value), there was no clear NDS priority within Novell. It was mixed up with NetWare priorities, Groupwise, UnixWare, etc. In fact, I will say that there was a very clear change of priority from NetWare and other priorities to NDS in 1998. In fact, after the NetWare 5 official release, Novell turned on the NDS priority to a level that it was clear NO OTHER PRIORITY WAS MORE IMPORTANT! That intensity is growing even more at Novell and I agree whole-heartedly with what I see happening. Novell is not an Internet leader in the eyes of the Industry. In fact, Novell still is not on the Internet Vendor radar screens because Novell has not yet demonstrated how their Internet-Ready technology can be used to address E-Commerce and Internet service portal solutions. Digital Me will be the first of I hope many NDS enabled E-Commerce and Internet services. Hopefully Slitz is reading messages like ours and realizing that E-Commerce MUST BE A STRATEGIC PRIORITY NOW - although not the only priority. Novell has also begun targetting the ERP slant of NDS-enablement which is equally important to win over and entrench the Enterprise customer which is still Novell's largest revenue target customer by far. Novell's re-developed Consulting Services group has been building a large inventory of ERP type resources to make a mindshare stamp on the ERP arena. If you dont believe this then go look at the Novell web site under employment opportunities and see what the most demanded postion/skill is that Novell is looking for. Thats all I have to say about that - but I have a fear that you will again find something wrong with this posting as well. So somehow I expect that I will have to be clarifying my statements pretty soon. Lets hope not. Toy