Novell bets its future on ASPs

1999-12-22

Directories are dull, but not to Novell as the company is betting its future on them. The future of the company hangs in the balance – if it gets it wrong, it could be consigned to IT history. If right, it could sweep the landscape of IT like a forest fire. The question is, which is it? And the answer may be found in Application Service Providers, or ASPs.

In our opinion, the arrival of broadband communications will signal new models for using IT. ASPs are an indication of the way things will go, with the rental of applications which are accessed over the Web. However this model of ASPs is just the beginning – many different types of service, including communications services, information feeds, application services and business services, will be integrated and provided to businesses and consumers alike. This is the vision, but it is currently hampered not only by bandwidth constraints, but also by a lack of a set of facilities without which the ASP model cannot function. These are billing, management, security and, of course, directory services.

Directories will play a central role in the service provision model, as they will hold information about all the who, what and where of the service infrastructure. With products like Novell’s NDS the mechanisms for directory already exist; however they have not yet been adopted on a sufficiently widespread basis. Novell is betting that they will, and when companies start to pick a product, it wants NDS to be the de facto choice. This is why Novell have started giving away sections of NDS to the open source community, hoping that this will speed its adoption.

What could go wrong for Novell? In a word, Microsoft. Active Directory is currently waiting in the wings for its moment of glory, however this will come in the next few months. In the meantime Novell are attempting to get as big a head start as possible. With NDS release 8, the company has already established a reputation for the product as stable, performant and well-supported by the growing ranks of qualified administrators. This week’s announcement by Information Week, that NDS 8 would be their product of the year, can only have been icing on the cake for Novell, not to mention the recently broken deal with CNN Interactive. Novell’s biggest threat may also prove to have too many other battles to fight, particularly as the portability across many platforms is a clear differentiator for NDS over Active Directory.

Given the way IT is going, it looks like Novell have read the runes correctly. The company is positioning its flagship product at the heart of the Internet, and it will take a substantial knock to remove it once it gets established. ASPs may still have a way to come, but when they do, Novell will already be there.

(First published 22 December 1999)