First of all Mitch, thanks for an enlightened response. It was the best response to my posting so far. Let me respond to your points...
I have trouble following your line of thought. You seem to think that because NDS
is a superior technology to ADS (which I agree with), this will lead to an inevitable
downfall of MSFT and the glorious ascension of NOVL. I would disagree with
both predictions, and will deal with each (in reverse order).
You are right in your assumption that DS is one factor that will harm MSFT. I have not nor will I plan on saying that there will be a downfall of MSFT. It will experience the same cyclical fate that IBM encountered through most of the 80s and 90s.
Second, read my posting again, I do not believe I used such glorious terms for the rise of NOVL. BUT, look at NOVL's stock over the past year. The main reason for that is not simply because of increased sales of NetWare 5 and some other well executed products. The main strength has been and will more so be because of the capabilities of NDS. NOVL's flagship product in the up-coming years will be NDS, NOT NetWare. That may stun you but listen to the NOVL Executives. They are out-right saying it to the industry. So, YES, NDS will be the pheonix rising for NOVL. I dont have to predict it anymore, it is happening as we speak. Just take a look Mitch.
#1: The glorious ascension of NOVL
This assumes at least one of two options: One, that sale of NDS will lead to
significant direct revenues. Or that, two, widespread deployment of NDS will give
NOVL the "power of Directory Services" and therefore provide leverage for sales
of software/services that build on this "power".
As I said before, the reason that NOVL's other products are selling at a much faster pace is mainly because of their integration with NDS and NDS's growing dominance of the DS market. Groupwise is a great product, but its the NDS integration that is NOVL's biggest selling point for Groupwise. If I am architecting a messaging solution for a customer that has NDS, the choice is natural! GroupWise. The other features of Groupwise are a commodity that most other messaging systems also have.
So, this theory is not a theory Motch, NOVL's current sales grows are mainly attributed to NDS leverage. Dont take my word for it, ask a NOVL Marketing Exec how big an influence NDS is when selling all their other products.
First, direct revenues are not going to be earth-shaking. Directory services, by their
very nature, are successful because of the ability to scale heirarchically, and their
interoperability. This means that NDS is only able to lock in the top level of the
pyramid/heirarchy if it is able to communicate and cooperate with the lower levels
(via LDAP), which may be implemented in ADS or slapd. Therefore, the per-unit
cost of NDS is capped by the competing implementations, and the number-of-units
is capped by the heirarchical nature of DS.
Although I agree that NDS's current direct revenue might initially be limited, it is not because of your theory. NOVL is growing the direct NDS revenue right now of NDS licensing on non-NetWare platforms. Since there are vastly more units of all the other NOS, OS, and other computing devices than NetWare units, the direct revenue from licensing to all these other platforms is enormous. In fact, NOVL can thank MSFT for all those new NT servers out there that have useless Domains (and soon to be Active Directory). All these servers are a huge channel to gain direct NDS revenue on sales of NDSforNT for years to come.
I do not agree with your thoery on a DS's place in the upper containers of the directory and LDAP in the lower branches. NDS will compete at go after dominance at all levels of a tree. LDAP is not a DS and only an query/inter-connect protocol. A DS like NDS, AD, NEtscape, eNetwork, etc. will be needed at all levels of the tree. Corporations will realize soon enough that the less number of different vendors and trees they must maintain, the better. No DS Tree inter-connect strategy will come close to the efficiencies of a single tree. The inter-connect will be used to connect trees amoung Corporations more so than to connect Trees inside corporations.
So, I do not agree. NDS will gain revenue from all levels of the tree and from all the different platforms that NDS will penetrate.
Second, NOVL will never be able to leverage a potential domination of directory
services. What are they going to leverage? NDS will run on multiple platforms, so
you can't leverage Netware sales. NOVL has no clout in the client arena, so you
can't leverage that. The only way NDS can become dominant is by exposing all its
power through an open interface (such as LDAP), which would allow all clients
(including Exchange and MS Office and AD) to take advantage of it.
NOVL is leveraging their current large install of NetWare servers now. There are millions of NetWare servers out there. NOVL already has 50 million NDS nodes out there mainly because of NetWare presence.
The other platforms like NT, Solaris, OS/390, AIX, Linux, Unixware, etc. will also be leveraged to allow NDS to further entrench its DS dominance in the market. Active Directory will not have this ability because the paranoid Executives at MSFT will never consider developing AD on competing OS platforms (remember they are still in the OS paradigm) until they realize that open standards will make the NOS/SOS a moot point.
The client domination is of no value to a DS expansion like NDS. The client will likely use LDAP as their linkage to the DS. NOVL knows that and has fully embraced that. NDSv8 has NATIVE LDAPv3. The LDAP standard only further promotes the DS and therefor NDS.
#2: an inevitable downfall of MSFT
For the reasons given above, I can't see it. Even a domination by NDS would not
threaten MSFT's revenue stream. MSFT owns the client space (MS Office).
Instead, you should be worried about how MSFT will tie MS Office to ADS. I
have not had a chance to review Office2000, but I would assume that their email
client will work with any LDAP source. However, I wouldn't be surprised if other
applications (Word, Excel, etc) communicated exclusively through the native ADS
interface. This would provide significant pressure for IT shops to use ADS (vs
NDS), all other things being equal (or even somewhat close to equal if you squint
your eyes).
Like I said before, MSFT will not experience a downfall. But until they realize and are able to do something about the new paradigm shift that has occured in the industry over the past 2 years (of which the DS is and will more so be a major part of this shift), they will show more and more signs of a company that is struggling (similar to IBM's struggles in the 80s and 90s).
Thanks again Mitch for the informative and worthy response!
Toy |
