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

To: Spartex who wrote (25253)	2/1/1999 10:20:00 AM
From: DJBEINO	Respond to of 42771

Novell has its eye on Israeli technology By NICKY BLACKBURN TEL AVIV (February 1) - Accurate and trustworthy business-to-business communication is the new growth area of the Internet, Glenn Ricart, chief technology officer at Utah-based Novell recently told The Jerusalem Post. "The Internet has become so large and is growing so fast that the main issue now is how to search and locate the companies, goods, and resources you need and know that you are getting information you can trust," said Ricart who was here earlier this month for the third annual conference of the Internet Society of Israel. "On the Internet anyone can put up a site and pretend to be someone they aren't. You can't do business with new organizations if you don't trust them." The solution, said Ricart, who is responsible for the development and architecture of Novell's current technologies and the creation of new ones, is to create inter-enterprise directories that are accurate and up to date. "A number of Israeli companies understand this and have taken it to heart." Ricart, who developed SURAnet, the world's first Internet service provider while he was director of the Computer Science Center at the University of Maryland, said that Novell, like other multinational players, is actively searching for technologies that will help create Internet communities. "We are looking for technologies like ICQ [the popular chat line set up by Mirabilis], that will help us create new business-to-business communities, not just people-to-people ones. We want to learn how to use existing communities to grease the skids of business transactions." Ricart, who has been visiting once a year for the last few years, said that Novell has taken an increasing interest in the technologies being developed here. "We realized a few years ago that we need to acquire technologies from around the world and Israel is a fertile spot," he said. In December, Novell Israel, the local branch of Novell, began negotiations with six companies with the aim of buying a local firm specializing in consultation, support, and integration of data communications networks. On this visit Ricart has meetings arranged with five companies. Ricart said that unlike competing multinational companies, such as Microsoft, Novell has no plans to open an R&D center here. "The traditional model of a self-contained development office is no longer applicable," he said. "The Internet allows us to have engineers from all over the world working together on joint developments on a project-to-project basis." Ricart is full of praise for the way Israel has organized its Internet connections and believes that other countries have much to learn from it. "In Israel there is a single Internet exchange point. This is the logical thing to do, but other countries are usually less organized and in some cases send their traffic via the US. Life is much easier for Israeli companies because they can focus on technology, not on the process of connection." In addition, he said Israel has a single registry of names, which means that all domain names in the country end in "il." "As a result any problems can be resolved locally without going elsewhere in the world." Ricart also highlights three other areas which he believes will be key issues in the years to come. Firstly he said that by 2003, a new address system for the Web will have to be introduced because it will run out of addresses. "This has been developed, but people have to understood all the ramifications," said Ricart. Secondly, he said, a new system of charging will have to be developed to pay for the backbone of the Internet, and finally the international community must resolve a number of legal issues connected to its use, for example different countries have different defamation and decency laws. jpost.com