Directory sky hook too late for Novell?

2000-03-28

Novell was due for a shake-up and now it has had one. It was only a matter of time before the company moved its focus once and for all, away from its operating system heritage and into a directory-based future.

In Salt Lake City yesterday, Novell unveiled a new strategy that can be summed up with the d-word. The Internet has been the reason for Novell’s current instability – the market for a commercial network operating system kind of goes away when the whole world has standardised on a NOS which is available for free. Faced with a shaky set of results, the company has had little choice but to put its business firmly where it has been seeing the most success. No surprises that this should be back on the Net.

We have written about this before. We have had high hopes for Novell. The NDS technology is good, the vision is right and, up until recently, the market was wide open for a directory product. The only competitor – Microsoft – was so late with its Active Directory product, first announced in 1997 and finally launched with Windows 2000 a few weeks back, that all Novell had to do was occupy the space. How very, very easy life can be sometimes.

Novell seems to suffer from a most unfortunate sense of timing. In the end Microsoft proved stunningly accurate about the launch date of W2K including Active Directory, so Novell cannot claim that they did not know.

There are a couple of points in Novell’s favour. The first is that the product is tried and tested. Most pundits are recommending that W2K is allowed to bed in for a while before it is adopted more generally – this may throw Novell the slack it needs. The second point is that the company, having dropped its baggage, is free to work with whatever leads to its success. The company’s recent Linux announcements for its directory services are an indication of this – it is unlikely that Microsoft’s Active Directory will run on anything other than a single operating system.

Novell still stand a chance of success. There is no question about the importance that directory services will start to play as the Internet evolves to become a virtual services infrastructure. Given the fact that Novell have lost its lead, whether it is NDS that is chosen may well prove to be mainly a question of slick marketing. Whatever it does, Novell had better do it fast.

(First published 28 March 2000)