12.08.07

Novell’s Salespeople Admit Financial Misconduct (Massaging GNU/Linux Figures)

Posted in Finance, GNU/Linux, Novell at 1:11 am by Roy Schestowitz

Ouch!

Ashlee Vance: “And top of all this, we have Novell just today when we were recording the broadcast they had to lay their 4th quarter earnings because of a SEC probe.”

”…I can tell you absolutely for a verifiable fact for that Novell does do that, but then again everybody does that. So… I’ve.. I’ve got the sales guys at Novell telling me that, that they do this…“Matt Asay: “Well, I doubt, I tend… I don’t know who reported on that, but I saw something where they say, you know, this probably isn’t due to Novell massaging its numbers around Linux, which is what Dana Blakenhorn at ZDNet had claimed, I mean, I can tell you absolutely for a verifiable fact for that Novell does do that, but then again everybody does that. So… I’ve.. I’ve got the sales guys at Novell telling me that, that they do this, but it just doesn’t matter, I… I suspect that this is a tech… like a technicality that Novell has run afoul of and not a big deal, but maybe I’ll.. maybe we’ll be wrong, maybe I’ll be wrong, we should see.”

Ashlee Vance: “So you think people fudge the shipping numbers or they’re fudging revenue numbers, I mean, reve..?”

Matt Asay: “No…no… no… no not… just saying that they are putting it into different buckets. Ummm…like, some of that Linux revenue that Novell reports, based on what I’ve heard from Linux inside the company, is not Linux revenue by… by.., what are… reasonably prudently outside observer and what they would say.” █