Novell Details Web Services Assault

The vendor detailed its plans for Web services, including Enterprise UDDI and Novell Workspace Web services for corporate use, during its BrainShare 2002 conference here last week. The company said product teams also are working on Novell GroupWise Services, Novell Portal Integration Service, Yahoo Portal XIS Service, XML Store Service, LDAP Client Service, SOAP Client/Server Services and UDDI Client/Server Services.

The Enterprise UDDI service, which a Novell product manager said will be available later this year, will allow a company's partners and customers to discover, publish and access Web services from outside of a corporate firewall.

It remains unclear how many of the other Web services currently under development will be commercialized, but service and solution providers will play a role in their deployment, Novell insiders said.

"I see tremendous value in Web services for channel partners," said Richard Bliss, product marketing manager for GroupWise at Novell. "They can now compete with Microsoft's .Net concept."

The company told customers and partners at BrainShare that it intends to capitalize on its reputation in directory, management and security market technologies in the Web services era. Its forthcoming Web services are extensions of existing services that fall under its One Net strategy, in which the company envisions intranets, extranets and the Internet as a unified network.

Like Microsoft, Novell intends to transform products such as Workspace, GroupWise and Portal Server into XML Web services that can be leveraged over the Internet.

"We expect to drive the entire adoption of UDDI," said Chris Stone, vice chairman, Office of the CEO, at Novell. The company plans to extend its existing net directory services and applications into XML Web services for intranet and B2B use, he added. "We have Net services, and we are moving to extended Web services," he said. "We will be based on XML, and that's it. We're not doing proprietary interfaces."

Solution providers and systems integrators will be recruited to handle the new Web services and solutions, Stone said. "Web services opens up an enormous number of opportunities for the channel," he said during his BrainShare keynote. "It's a key area for us. What a wonderful way to re-energize the channel."

One Novell solution provider said the accelerated move to Internet and Web services will be a big plus for channel partners. "Novell is moving to the end-user experience when historically it's been a back-end [server company," said Tim Spires, vice president of sales at The Harding Group, Dallas. "That's what we're excited about."