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RE[7]: Goodbye Novell
by IanSVT on Thu 11th Oct 2007 02:25 UTC in reply to "RE[6]: Goodbye Novell"
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Well, I'm afraid you've been out of the loop. Customers do not want a choice of two kernels - they want to know what Novell is selling. Customers have been jumping ship for quite some time, hence Novell's somewhat dire financial results and a new round of layoffs apparently.

I know Windows has been dominating NetWare market share since the late 90s before Linux was a blip on the radar, and it continues to this day. Neither your nor I really know if a dual kernel approach during a phase out of the NetWare kernel has any impact whatsoever on that outside of anecdotal evidence.

No, they didn't. Novell went and did that of their own accord, and they thought that's what customers wanted. You have to get the meaning from what customers say, not what they actually. Rather like women! Who in their right mind thinks that customers want to choose a kernel?

Well, probably the customer with an installed base of NetWare servers, who need(ed) time to plan a proper migration and get their staff properly trained. You can't get all customers on board with a new product 100%. Microsoft can't even do that with moving users off of XP onto Vista. It just isn't realistic. Some customers welcome change, some resist. You can't alienate one group. I know I want the choice to run either in our server room.

Novell are doing that fine, I'm afraid. The key here is decisiveness. Novell should have announced that they were moving away from Netware, but should have come up with a clear migration plan and tools and a clear incentive for customers to move to the new Linux offering so that it was as damn near a drop-in replacement as possible - with tons of added goodies to keep them. There's simply no reason for any Netware admin today to move to the Linux version of OES, simply because it's different, there's nothing compelling to move to it for (other than Novell can't keep up with hardware support for Netware, which is not a customer's problem) and it's simply a Linux version of something that does what Netware does, except arguably worse in his eyes with nothing extra. Many organisations are simply moving to Windows servers completely to manage their networks.

Novell customers have known since OES1 came out that NetWare's development was on the decline. It was not only an obvious scenario, Novell outright said it. You're off base on your comment about hardware support. If you want to continue to run NCP/eDirectory/NSS volumes/iPrint and so on, hardware support it very much is a customer problem in addition to Novell's. Beyond that, if a hardware vendor won't make drivers available for NetWare, what can Novell do? Moreover, third party support for Linux is far and away better than NetWare, especially in the enterprise sector. If those aren't clear reasons for a customer to move, then clearly IT isn't critical to them.

Errrr, no, because one's a mail server and one's an OS.

The mail server is a service, and the other is a series of services. eDirectory is not an OS, it's a service. iPrint is not an OS, it's a service. iFolder is not an OS, it's a service. SLES is the OS, NetWare is the OS, OES is the services coupled with the OS.

We have one big Netware using client, and they've already...

What do they use NetWare for then?

You need an awful lot more incentive than the ability to run Netware services on new hardware if you're going to move to something new. If you're moving to new hardware then you might as well just move to Windows, or Red Hat, and that's the view many companies are taking.

I don't need any more incentive than that. If you're using those services I mentioned above, then you want to have and OS that will run those services and be supported on current hardware. You can't tell me that moving to OES Linux is harder or more of a hassle than ripping up your directory services and replacing it with Active Directory, replacing your entire mail system with Exchange, moving all of your printers to a wholly different management suite. RedHat doesn't even have proper equivalents in many of these service areas. You're incorrectly trivializing the costs of these processes. Migrations from NetWare(or from any other server OS including Windows) is not driven by a "hassle" factor. It's driven by service needs. People move to Windows to run Exchange, NOT because Linux is too hard. If that's all it takes to move from NetWare, I can't honestly tell you why you(as in a customer) were even using NetWare in the first place because it couldn't have been for much.

That sounds just like Novell themselves. The open source company.........that isn't. Because they need to prolong the life of their OS and their services in another operating system, that operating system is open source, and one of the benefits of Novell using Linux and open source software is shared development and Netware services usage increasing.

I can't disagree with that. But you didn't answer the question. Where is the benefit? Are you assuming that the open sourcing of eDirectory would automatically drive development for it? If Hula was any indication, just because you open source something, doesn't mean there is any interest in it out there in the community.

To sum up, you don't seem to put much value in the services that run on OES NetWare or OES Linux and in turn seem to extrapolate that general feeling onto customers as a whole. You also discount 3rd party support and hardware support. You discount the time it takes to plan a migration, secure the funds, secure the hardware, and train your staff. You also say that Novell should rip and replace NetWare and that there is no incentive to move. Well, if you want to continue to run Novell's services, clearly OES Linux is your best choice since NetWare is going to be EOL'ed.

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