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

To: EPS who wrote (26690)	4/19/1999 9:48:00 AM
From: Loring	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42771

Meanwhile, over at the CPQ board: To: Eric Strohmeyer (58659 ) From: Nilesh Parikh Monday, Apr 19 1999 9:38AM ET Reply # of 58666 Not a bad idea. So, let's get NOVL & Schmidt. I don't think the integration of DEC has been the root cause of the earnings problem, but DEC has not started contributing to the bottom line as expected. That will take time. NOVL would actually help.Spinoff AV, bring NOVL, bring Schmidt, focus on transforming the company to internet company, - hell, add.com to the company name if that will boost the stock short-term, while working on the long-term strategy. I'm excited about today's news, and more so about the future. The future can't get any darker.

To: EPS who wrote (26690)	4/20/1999 12:12:00 AM
From: PJ Strifas	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 42771

Hello All. I've often taken time to explain things in technical terms since that's what I understand easiest. I've always tried to keep my "technical" rants in line with the spirit of our financial discussion. With that in mind.... There's an interesting article in this week's InternetWeek regarding Cisco's (and Ford Motor Co.'s) decision to NOT wait for Active Directory but rather install and deploy Netscape's Open Directory server for their business-to-business extranet services. Basically, Cisco has over 400,000 active external "users" who access their extranet to purchase up to 70% of their products. Ford's Supplier Network has something in the range of 2,500 suppliers totalling 15,000 users accessing some 150 applications for parts, distribution, sales etc. All this effort for simplified authentication, administration and security says Ford while Cisco cites a savings of roughly $500,000 this year because of a cut in adminstrative salaries (they went from 7 admins to 1). Both companies are considering meta-directories to collect information about their intranet and extranet users (is anyone else here thinking digitalme?). Both companies state they could not wait for MSFT's vaporware or Novell's NDSv8 (which should ship in July). Both of which incorporate the LDAP protocol natively (which is what Netscape's server is based on). Ford is a pure MSFT shop meaning it only uses MSFT NT for it's file & print services as well as other things. They too opted for Netscape's product. This has a two-fold effect - 1) It's a HUGE example on why directories will be the NEXT wave in distributed, web-enabled networking. Both of these companies are considered "cutting-edge" tech shops (Cisco seems the more obvious but trust me so is Ford Motors). This also lends proof to Novell's ideal that the directory will be (and rightfully so) the center of all networking. Everything flows from the directory. Once this "religon" gets around, more and more people will be looking to NDS to fill that role in their networks. 2) While this appears to be a "blow" to the NDS bandwagon, it's really not. Both Ford and Cisco state their decision was purely one of convenience. The Netscape product was here and now not a few months away (as NDSv8) or coming sometime later this year (Active Directory). This reason coupled with the fact that "time is money" pushed both companies to choose Netscape's product. This means one of 2 things in my mind: 1) Each company will take a good look at both upcoming products when they do make it to market. NDS will get a better look since it's more mature than Active Directory. I can see other companies following their lead. HUGE opportunity for NOVL. 2) The directory market will become the straw that makes or breaks companies. The window here is the next 6 months as NDS-related products from Lucent, Nortel, Tivoli et al begin to see the light of the marketplace. With the news from Redmond not too rosy, this leaves NOVL with a unique position of gaining some LARGE marketshare and revenue dollars. Another article in this week's InternetWeek was one concerning Novell's release of it's Outlook plug-in. Nothing earth shattering here but in a nutshell, this allows companies to use MSFT's Outlook e-mail frontend to work with Novell's powerful GroupWise product. This is something of note here since many end-users enjoy the closely intergrated Outlook when using Windows PCs. This may be the start of something that halts the "bleeding" of GroupWise installations to MS Exchange. A side note in thie article is that NDS for NT 2.0 is much closer to market than previously thought. Not only that but it's said that NDS for NT 2.0 will allow companies to use NDS in an entirely NT environment without a NetWare server. What does that mean? Well, who needs Active Directory when you can use NDS on NT? Once you get NDS on NT, you can then get ZENworks, GroupWise, et al too! See - while in the past it was all about selling servers to sell your products, now it will be the directory that will carry the products. This is a shift from servers to directory users that will carry revenue growth for the foreseeable future. NDS already has 50 million users. I wish I had a dollar amount what each user represented in terms of revenue for NOVL! I can only guess what that would be but one day soon, someone is going to come up with a dollar amount and it won't be cheap either. When I think of each user, I see at a minimum, 5 other directory objects related to that user. If we could further break down the revenues to directory objects.... :) I'm getting too technical here so I'll stop :) Peter J Strifas