Novell Outlines NetWare Roadmap

Novell

During his BrainShare 2002 keynote here, Novell Vice Chairman Chris Stone said the launch of new solutions such as Novell Workspace and Zenworks Synergy at the show represent the new kinds of solutions that will characterize Novell's future offerings.

However, Stone quickly laid out a product road map for NetWare to assure the thousands of customers and partners in the audience that the network operating system is not going sway.

Novell, for example, plans to launch an upgraded version of Netware in the near future, code-named Nakoma, that will offer customer zero cost of deployment features and additional support for Internet standards and the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) environment, Stone said, noting the company wants to entice developers to the Novell camp.

The company also announced an expanded relationship with BEA Systems to bring additional J2EE capabilities to NetWare and Novell's other line of directory services, company executives said. Cambridge Technology Partner parlayed its longstanding relationship with BEA Systems in the application deployment segment to benefit Novell.

Following the imminent release of Nakoma, Novell plans to ship a version of NetWare, code-named Hayden, that is enhanced with 32-/64-bit support and industrial strength features such as dynamic partitions and policy-based management, Stone said.

Finally, Novell plans to develop a self-healing and self-configuring version of NetWare, code-named Uinta, he said.

And while the company is re-engineering its full line of Net services to be deployed without a NetWare client, Novell will continue to enhance the NetWare client for its faithful following. The company, for example, is developing a version of Zenworks for desktops that does not require the NetWare clients, company executives said at the show.

Novell acknowledges that there has been a drop-off in sales of NetWare through channel partners in recent years, but the company under new management is going to push NetWare 6 hard through the channel, Stone told CRN in an interview at BrainShare. "I'm so sick of this," Stone said about Microsoft's gains against Novell in the SMB market. "Why should we sit back? We have tons of NetWare 3 customers."

At the show, Novell's current top two channel executives claimed the company has been successful in recent months, first by signing up a number of new solution providers, including getting 300 partners renewed via Partnernet 2002, and also working to gain back customers that have defected to other platforms.

Solutions based on NetWare 6, iChain, ZenWorks Synergy and Zenworks for Desktops, Novell Workspace and eDirectory are big, said Starla Cox, director of North American channels and partnering at the company.

Ladd Timpson, worldwide director of channel marketing at Novell, said the big opportunities for solution providers in 2002 lie in networking and storage, security and access, content and application management and user provisioning. "We're seeing more opportunities for channel partners," Timpson said.