An Interview with Drew Major New Challenges for Novell's Chief Scientist
By David Martinez
Despite his legendary status in the networking
industry, Drew Major isn't ready to rest on his
accomplishments. "I take it as a personal challenge
to get us into some new markets," said the person
who was probably most responsible for getting Novell
into any markets at all.
Back in the early 1980s, Major was the lead
programmer on the team that invented NetWare;
some have even called him the Father of NetWare.
Now, he's Novell's chief scientist and vice president
for advanced development, responsible for creating
new products and helping Novell grow its business.
Recently I had the opportunity to talk with Major
about his legacy and his ideas for new products. We
discussed a variety of subjects, including the origins
of the NetWare file server, Novell's strengths, and his
opinion of the next wave of the Internet.
Read the article for more. Plus you can watch the
video or listen to the audio of the edited interview via
streaming media.
HOW NETWARE STARTED
It's no understatement to say that NetWare changed
the future of computing. Yet it had a pretty rocky
start. Novell Data Systems, the company that
preceded Novell, Inc., nearly went bankrupt before it
could make money on the product.
"Ray Noorda came in literally at the 11th hour and
brought some money and rescued us," said Major,
describing the scene with a smile. "It was funny. The
week before we shut down they were actually selling
desks and chairs to make the payroll. The company
was that far away from insolvency."
But Major, Noorda, and others believed strongly in
their creation: the file server. Why?
"I remember catching a vision—this was December
of '81," he explained. "We had been working on DEC
machines, shared processing machines, and we
started realizing that with the PC, you don't need to
share the CPU anymore but you still want to share
data. It was kind of a convergence of a bunch of
different ideas: certainly the PC and its explosion,
and the fact that there were networking cards, and
we just stumbled on to the first killer app of
networking, which was sharing files."
Major said he was surprised other companies didn't
stumble onto the idea sooner. By the time IBM and
Microsoft came out with their file servers in 1985,
Novell already had been in the market for four years.
"In a sense, Microsoft and IBM legitimized the file
server market," Major explained, "so everyone had to
be a file server. But we had the best product."
Looking back, Major is proud of all the things they did right when they were building the first file servers. In particular, he pointed to the fact that NetWare was an entire system, not just a server.
"We wanted to have users and authentication and rights, and make it as much as possible like the DEC machines, the VAX machines we'd been running on. We were trying, in a sense, to replace minicomputers with networks of PCs," he observed.
"NetWare was faster, it was more of a system, and it facilitated sharing. It was a natural thing that you wanted. That's been our original vision and we're still sticking with it."
NEW PRODUCT: INTERNET CACHING SYSTEM
One of Major's latest projects that fits into that vision is the Novell Internet Caching System (ICS). Announced at BrainShare '99 in March and demonstrated by Major in his keynote address there, ICS is software that dramatically speeds access to Internet sites and expands the capacity of web servers. ICS is packaged and sold like an appliance: you plug it into any network and it starts working right away.
I asked Major about the niche that ICS fills.
"The internet needs caching big time," he said. "When things like audio and video come on, the amount of data being pumped and the amount of storage going online is going to expand exponentially. And because we can do it many times better than general purpose platforms, we have great opportunities just around that."
But the way Major described it, caching is just a means to an end. "Caching is the foundation piece," he said. "The real value is the solutions you build on it."
One solution is to couple the cache with a network directory like Novell Directory Services (NDS). NDS's power is that it maintains user information and manages authentication and access. It helps answer the need for controlling individual identity on the vastly expanding Internet. Working together with a proxy cache, NDS can enable a whole new class of services and conveniences.
Major described a situation that could be alleviated by this powerful combination of identity and caching. "Today you've got 20 web sites, you've got 20 user names, and you've got 20 passwords. And you go to every one of them and you got to give your credit card to them.
What if your ISP (Internet service provider) could do all the billing for you, like a 900 number on the telephone? What if premium content on the Internet is available via the same thing? You go to different sites and you subscribe and you don't have to fill out that long form yet again."
Major believes that the next level of the Internet will have solutions like that.
"I personally believe that the Internet today was driven by browsers, common protocols, and Web servers, and the fact that there was this dumb, almost telephone like switch in the middle called TCP/IP routing," he explained. "And to get to the next wave, the next level, there needs to be more intelligence in the middle, via caching and other things, and more identity in the middle."
NOVELL'S OPPORTUNITY
And where does Novell fit in?
"That whole play is our opportunity," he said. "It's huge. It's around our core competencies, it has great upside, and we've got the best technology today for it. And with this appliance packaging, which we're doing with the proxy cache and we'll probably extend to other services later, we have ways of getting into this market without having to sell NetWare. The proxy cache appliance is the first attempt to get into that space. And from all indications, it's going to be a big hit."
Entering new markets is Major's personal challenge, but it doesn't mean he—or Novell as a whole—is departing from its core competencies.
"I'm not going outside of our roots," he asserted. "Everything we do with the appliance,we're leveraging the core technologies. We're just taking them into new markets by packaging them differently. Can you think of a better play, a better way of growing? And then you couple that with the explosion of the Internet, the explosion of the need for caching and identity, and how well-positioned we are there. All that is very synergistic with what we've got already."
You can watch or listen to the entire conversation using the RealMedia player.
Published June 2, 1999
novell.com
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