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

To: PJ Strifas who wrote (26994)	5/24/1999 2:37:00 PM
From: DJBEINO	Respond to of 42771

Directory Services Provide Springboard For Novell JAMIE LEWIS May 24, 1999 What a difference two short years can make. At Networld+Interop '97, Microsoft was widely viewed as the heir apparent to the once mighty network throne of Novell, which was in a dramatic downward spiral. Then, Cisco announced it was licensing Microsoft's Active Directory and planned to use it as the basis for its implementation of the Directory Enabled Networking specification. Just weeks prior to that announcement, Eric Schmidt had officially joined Novell as CEO and chairman, and Microsoft greeted his arrival with the inflated announcement of a partnership around a directory that wasn't shipping. But given Microsoft's momentum and Novell's lack thereof, it was perfectly appropriate to wonder if Novell could regain any of its former glory. Since that time, Microsoft has left the door wide open for Novell to do just that. If Microsoft had focused on making NT 5 the distributed directory and security release of its server operating system, and shipped it sometime in late 1997 or early 1998, Novell would face much less favorable odds today. And if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a bicycle. Where Microsoft tried to pack everything it could into one release of Windows, Novell embarked on a more orderly march, focusing first on getting its product house in order and then outlining a directory-centric product strategy that continues to unfold. That has allowed Novell to declare victory on a regular basis with products like Z.E.N.works, NDS for NT, NetWare 5 and, more recently, NDS 8. Each announcement-and subsequent delivery-increased Novell's momentum. Under Schmidt, Novell is a very different company. Its focus on directory services, and its return to the company's traditional strengths of integrating what IT organizations have installed, has paid off with re-established credibility. NDS 8, in particular, is an important step forward for Novell, addressing basic architectural issues, including scalability and LDAP support, giving the company a more robust architecture for future development. And with its focus on identity management and the concept of a full-service directory, Novell is articulating a broad vision of what general-purpose directories can and should do. Directories are indeed the foundation for identity management in a distributed environment. The boundaries between the LAN and WAN are collapsing; the Internet is becoming the infrastructure for intra- and intercompany communications and commerce. Within that infrastructure, the directory will tie the policies that govern who can enter the network and what they can do once they've done so to an authenticated identity. Likewise, the directory will define the relationships between the many facets of a person's identity, a person's relationship to the network and the relationships between the resources the network contains. That makes unambiguous identity crucial, and the directory is the ideal place to manage it. Going forward, Novell's opportunity is to transcend its NOS roots and bridge the NOS, enterprise and extranet/e-commerce directory worlds. Each of these different directory roles relies on essentially the same technology, but they dictate different deployment scenarios. Those deployment scenarios create different scalability and performance challenges, both for the directory and the applications it supports. Because of its flexible architecture that can adapt to different deployment scenarios, Novell can carve out a role for itself in new markets, even in a world where Active Directory exists (once Microsoft ships). Clearly, Novell has a lot of work to do in seizing that opportunity. The company must fulfill its metadirectory promises, for example, and strengthen security with support for both Kerberos and public-key infrastructure technology. Most important, Novell must ship a version of NDS that is fully independent of NetWare. That means it runs on NT and Solaris natively, comes with all of the utilities necessary to manage it and doesn't require a NetWare server. Novell also needs to rationalize its application development story, which remains somewhat of a hodgepodge-a situation the company promises to remedy with the licensing of IBM's WebSphere. These are all important issues, and IT managers should carefully monitor Novell's progress. But it's clear that Novell understands these issues. And given the events of the past two years, its plans to address them now carry a lot more weight. Jamie Lewis is president of The Burton Group, a research firm specializing in network computing technologies. He can be reached at jlewis@tbg.com. internetwk.com