11.07.09

Novell News Summary – Part III: Pulse, SCO, Los Angeles and More

Posted in Google, Mail, NetWare, Novell, SCO, Security, Servers at 2:11 pm by Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Plenty of news dominated by Novell’s announcement of Pulse

THERE are many items today, but the only one of real significance is Pulse, so we shall begin with that.

Pulse

The following new product can seen as a sign that Novell is running out of ideas. Here is some initial coverage:

• Novell Pulse: Security and Backup to Google Wave
• Novell announces first major integration with Google Wave
• Novell Unveils Enterprise Collaboration Suite
• Novell unveils real-time collaboration platform for the enterprise and demonstrates Google Wave interoperability
• Update: Novell unveils enterprise social networking suite
• Novell Pulse rides Google Wave
• Novell Pulse Launches with Google Wave Support for Real-Time Collaboration

Here is the corresponding press release from Novell (something similar here) and announcement from Ian Bruce at Novell’s PR blog.

To quote some more coverage:

When Google Wave was first released, it impressed a lot of people from a technical standpoint. The trouble was, no one could figure out a practical use for it. Now, Novell has decided to take a shot, announcing a service known as Pulse.

From IDG:

Novell has unveiled an enterprise social networking suite that is integrated with Google’s new Wave application and lets co-workers collaborate on documents.

GWAVA adds some weight to it while GWAVACon is forming up.

GWAVA, a Novell Collaboration Partner, today revealed intended support for Novell Pulse, the recently announced real-time collaboration initiative that supports Google Wave protocols. GWAVA’s focus on collaboration data security and its long history of expertise with Novell technology means that communication security and data management will be available when Novell Pulse ships in 2010.

It is all rather interesting because Novell collaborates here on Wave, right after publicly insulting Google’s products [1, 2, 3, 4].

Mail

GroupWise support is offered by a variety of new applications and devices that appear in the past week’s news, e.g. [1, 2, 3, 4]. That last one is Android (Droid to be precise), which perhaps makes the Google-Novell relationship a little more reciprocal (see Wave/Pulse above).

There are other examples of Novell support, such as this new video from YouTube which is summarised as follows: “Demo of PortaMailLive Windows Mobile to Novell GroupWise wireless synchronization.”

So anyway, Google/Android phones are supporting GroupWise while replacing it too at another level. From the news at ECT:

A pilot project will begin in June, and a five-year deal with Computer Services Corporation will reportedly save LA $5.5 million dollars over the city’s existing vendor, Novell (Nasdaq: NOVL). CSC will serve as the systems integrator.

More information can be found here and in another ECT article:

Google And Cloud Computing Scores Win In Los Angeles

[...]

The main loser there was the city’s previous vendor, Novell (Nasdaq: NOVL), but it may have also been a big eye-opener for Microsoft: Large operations are taking Google seriously, and its prices are more attractive.

From The Examiner:

Google in Los Angeles? No the Mountain View, California, Googleplex is not relocating to sunny LA – the company already has an office in nearby Irvine. Rather, the City of Los Angeles is welcoming the company’s products into its system, replacing the Novell GroupWise e-mail servers and other programs the city currently uses.

Google forces Microsoft and Novell to lower prices and make special offers (Novell did mention something along these lines, not just Microsoft). Microsoft is clearly afraid of Google Apps. From the news:

Microsoft questions Google Apps’ momentum, touts 1M online business suite customers

[...]

Chris Capossela, senior vice-president of the information worker product management group at Microsoft, told Computerworld on Monday that 70% of those users “are coming from IBM Lotus Notes or Novell GroupWise.”

How does Microsoft know? Did IDG check to see evidence?

More coverage here:

The widely cited switch that the city of Los Angeles will be making, from Novell GroupWise, will place Gmail alongside Microsoft desktop apps, a situation that Burton Group analyst Guy Creese tells PCWorld is increasingly common among larger companies.

People

Still on the subject of Google, here is a Wall Street Journal article that reminds people of the Novell-Google intersection:

Google Inc. Chief Executive Eric Schmidt has snapped up Bay Area talent for years, first as an executive at Sun Microsystems Inc., then as CEO of computer maker Novell Inc. and now as the 54-year-old boss at Google.

More at CNET (also published in CNN):

Schmidt knows a thing or two about traditional enterprise customer service: he ran corporate software maker Novell before joining Google. And before Novell, he was an executive at Sun Microsystems.

Other than Schmidt, we were able to find Novell’s Mike Robinson quoted in Processor.com:

Start with the release notes to get a handle on known compatibility issues. You may find that you need to do some work before you start migration. “You may have to upgrade or patch the OS or other applications first in order to ensure a smooth upgrade,” says Mike Robinson, senior product marketing manager for Novell (www.novell.com). Those refinements may resolve some of the driver or other problems that you would have faced otherwise.

He is also quoted in the following new article from Processor.com:

Making a cost-of-downtime calculation specific to your own particular enterprise is beneficial for several reasons, says Richard Whitehead, director of solution marketing at software maker Novell (www.novell.com). By fixing downtime costs, IT managers can isolate problems within the data center that need improvement, determine the reason for the downtime, and fix the problems.

SCO

The SCO-Novell court case is not over. It may actually go on for a while longer. Groklaw writes about the Status Conference and also covers the Trustee’s moves. He is very influential at this stage, having been appointed to restore some sanity while McBride is out in the streets (not literally).

The deal that we announced at the end of last year with Novell I consider to be very important. It demonstrated clearly the value of intellectual property even in the Open Source world. I would not anticipate that we make a huge additional revenue stream from our Novell deal, but I do think it clearly establishes that Open Source is not free and Open Source will have to respect intellectual property rights of others just as any other competitor will.

Here is an old transcript that Groklaw got a hold of and also some details about the lawsuit against McBride (see [1, 2, 3] for context/background).

Pelican has filed its Memorandum in Opposition to Darl McBride’s Motion to Dismiss its complaint against him. It’s a scorcher. First, it says it was McBride who personally led and oversaw the smear campaign against Mark Robbins on the website SkylineCowboy.com. However, we have yet to hear from McBride on that point, as this filing points out. He hasn’t denied it, but then he hasn’t spoken about it substantively yet, relying instead on jurisdictional arguments. Most of the filing is in response to McBride’s assertion that the court lacks jurisdiction over him.

Older Products

Novell’s proprietary legacy keeps popping up in the news. Here is Netware mentioned in an article about “25 Years of PC Week” (the former magazine).

IBM and Microsoft were working together on OS/2 and Novell’s Netware was the most popular networking operating system because it could run on 80286s and use all of the entire memory of the machine.

IT Jungle on Novell servers:

The situation baffled us. Why didn’t TCP/IP remain active over our comm lines? Other network servers, including Microsoft Exchange, Windows file servers, and some Novell servers, started communicating again when the router was restarted.

Novell’s eDirectory is mentioned in IDG as follows:

Users marked as trusted can normally install or run any program they like, within the bounds of their security privileges. All the reviewed products linked to Active Directory, and at least one can link to Novell’s eDirectory services.

More on eDirectory:

PINpoint also provides additional, BES-specific information not normally found in the BlackBerry address book, as well as information collected from the corporate directory (e.g. Microsoft Active Directory or Novell eDirectory), such as department, city, job title, etc.

Novell’s old complaints against Microsoft keep showing up every now and then:

Novell and Sun Microsytems complained a few years back that Microsoft controlled the market through anti-competitive practices. European courts deemed Microsoft‘s Internet Explorer (IE), Windows Media Player (WMP), as added on software that failed to create fair competition.

Virtualisation

Novell is mentioned just very briefly in this analysis of virtualisation strategy at Citrix.

Citrix hopes to bolster the uncertain prospects of the Xen hypervisor by making its free XenServer product entirely open source. That is even though the company expects much more of its future server virtualisation business to be based on Microsoft’s rival Hyper-V hypervisor than XenServer. But by bolstering Xen today, Citrix is boosting Hyper-V for tomorrow. XenServer consists of the open-source Xen hypervisor, wrapped in proprietary Citrix code. A public comment from a senior Citrix executive has revealed that soon this outer wrapping will also be open source.

[...]

Due to Oracle’s acquisition of Virtual Iron last year, and its imminent purchase of Sun, there are now only three major backers for Xen: Citrix, Oracle and Novell. Citrix has said it believes most of its future server virtualisation business will be based on Hyper-V; Oracle faces a tough battle to increase its currently tiny share of the x64 bare-metal server virtualisation market; and, as a Linux supplier, Novell may well follow Red Hat’s example and support KVM.

Security

As we’ve shown twice in recent weeks, Novell is spreading fear in order to sell its products and this article from the British press reveals more of the same.

Novell has issued a warning to today local authorities that they risk failing to meet the assessment criteria for the GCSX Code of Connection (CoCo) because many have implemented systems that do not continuously secure, monitor and audit systems.

Ben Goodman is quoted in an article about internal threats:

“The joke is that if a person works for an organization long enough, they will eventually gain access to everything,” says Ben Goodman, director of technology, Novell.

One of our readers argues that “Symantec posts about fake Mac malware.” He links to Microsoft Jack and offers a translation for Symantec’s message: “please buy our defective AV products.”

Partners

Novell is said to have launched PartnerNet (it sure sounds like old news, which was reposted). Official support for Novell NetWare 5 and 6 comes from this product and Novell is also listed as a supplier in this case.

Other suppliers in the program besides HP and Lakeside include AEP Networks, Blue Coat, DataCore Software, Fortinet, Gemalto, Novell, SonicWall, ThinPrint and WYSE. Various other service and support offerings are included in the program as well.

Additionally, Novell was mentioned in many new press releases from Wyse, a longtime partner.

Utah

Novell’s facilities in Utah appear to have been used a lot recently. Examples:

• Utah Valley group to induct Steven Covey into Hall of Fame

Covey, 77, will be honored at a ceremony during the forum’s hall of fame dinner and fall social beginning at 6:30 p.m. in Provo, at Building A on the Novell Inc. campus, 1860 S. 180 East.

• A revolution in transmission technology?

At a news conference Wednesday at the Novell Technology Center, VMT announced the company had completed work on a computer-aided design prototype for a transmission that it said would improve vehicle gas mileage by at least 30 percent and allow for the production of better-performing sport-utility vehicles and large trucks.

There is also this sponsorship from Novell Technology Center:

The Utah Student 25 is sponsored by: Omniture, Silicon Slopes, Utah CEO, CEO-BYU, BTJD, Grant Thornton, Cornerstone Media, Compass Outdoor, KeyBank, Utah Fund of Funds, FundingUniverse, Provo Business Development Corporation, Utah Valley Entrepreneurial Forum, Novell Technology Center, Provo Tech Xelerator, Picture This!, PilmerPR, Bateman IP Law Group, Stephen W. Gibson, Doba, and SignCity.

That’s about it for this week. █

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