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

To: Spartex who wrote (25946)	3/10/1999 1:36:00 PM
From: DJBEINO	Respond to of 42771

Novell lays out its roadmap Company is taking the wraps off 6 Pack, Modesto and NDS Version 8. But what about those HP rumors? By Mary Jo Foley, Sm@rt Reseller March 9, 1999 1:53 PM PT Novell Inc. is revving its product engines in advance of its BrainShare developers conference later this month by laying out its roadmap for a number of key products. Novell (Nasdaq:NOVL) yesterday began its open beta for its next version of Novell Directory Services (NDS) 8--formerly code-named SCADS, or Scalable Directory Service. Interested parties can download NDS 8 from Novell's Web site and run the beta on top of NetWare 5.0 with the first NetWare 5.0 support pack. The company also committed to unveiling at BrainShare the next version of NetWare, a multiprocessing-optimized version, code-named 6 Pack. And Novell officials said the company would conduct at BrainShare in Salt Lake City the first public demonstration of an application running on a simulated IA-64 processor on top of the 64-bit version of NetWare, code-named Modesto. Novell announced a year ago it was developing Modesto in partnership with Intel Corp. and plans to be ready to ship it by mid-2000, when the IA-64 is expected to be commercially available. Novell's stock was up slightly this morning, but it was difficult to determine if the slew of product news or rumors of a possible Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE:HWP) takeover of the company were the cause. The HP takeover rumors, appearing on Yahoo! Individual Investor, noted that HP is in search of a new CEO for its systems business and current Novell CEO Eric Schmidt was the former chief technical officer at HP. Schmidt in fact was the former CTO at Sun Microsystems Inc. Full steam ahead While Microsoft Corp. wrestles with its Active Directory, Novell is cruising full steam ahead with NDS. On a conference call with financial analysts at the end of February, Schmidt said Novell potentially could ship NDS 8 within a month. But other Novell officials declined to provide a timetable, other than to promise that NDS 8 would be available on Solaris and NT within the year, and far sooner on NetWare. During closed beta tests in-house and among some top customers, Novell demonstrated that NDS 8 storing and accessing 500 million objects and performing just below 300 searches per second. Novell is hoping it can demo NDS 8 accessing 1 billion objects by Brainshare, its developer conference slated for the week of March 22, company officials said. NDS 8 is likely to be of prime interest to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and large corporate customers, said Michael Simpson, director of strategic market planning. "This [NDS 8] will be the first directory appropriate for corporate enterprise integration and highly centralized Internet applications. We have now laid to rest the idea that you need a separate e-commerce directory." Simpson noted that NDS 8 provides a needed foundation for ISP and application service provider (ASP) hosting services. "Once you open technologies across to the Internet, you have no control over how many people access them," he noted. "The average time people are willing to wait is 20 seconds. After that, you lose their eyeballs and their business. The most important aspect of scalability is being able to add users but keep performance predictable." zdnet.com