Novell Cleans Up Mail Message, Stakes Collaboration Claim

With Microsoft and IBM perpetually battling it out for the top spot in corporate messaging, one could forget that Novell GroupWise retains the No. 3 position. This despite all the noise around the open-source oriented newbies like Zimbra, Scalix and Open-Xchange.

Novell executives and their channel proponents say GroupWise offers cross-platform advantages, including Linux support, and does not require weighty hardware, as does Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. These partisans say that, as a result, the GroupWise business is actually growing.

There is some third-party evidence to back up their contention. Radicati Group research shows the GroupWise installed base market share rose to 7.4 percent in 2006, up from 6.7 percent the previous year.

"We think they're still the third player in a big market. We think [GroupWise is] about 6 percent of the commercial e-mail market," said Matt Cain, lead e-mail analyst at research firm Gartner. "There are companies who are loathe to go to the Microsoft stack and Novell does provide an alternative," he noted.

Novell executives and some of the company's longtime partners say GroupWise is a stable, viable and cross-platform alternative to rival offerings. And, by virtue of its deal with SiteScape, announced at Brainshare last month, Novell now also has a SharePoint competitor for white boarding and real-time collaboration.

But even Novell proponents and insiders concede that the company's collaboration and mail strategy could have been handled better over the past few years.

After Novell bought SUSE and its Linux know-how three years ago, it started to push Open-Xchange, the open-source mail that had been closely allied with SUSE.

And then there was technology emanating out of Ximian, another open-source company Novell acquired. Since then, "Novell has definitely cleaned house," said Gartner's Cain. "They had three e-mail strategies, Netmail and the open-source Hula/Maui thing and Groupwise. They've jettisoned Hula and Netmail."

After a couple of years in what one partner termed "the wilderness," GroupWise is back as Novell's de facto standard mail, with the software vendor now also touting SiteScape as its response to Microsoft SharePoint Server in collaboration. Novell will market its SiteScape implementations as Teaming or Teaming Plus Conferencing.

Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian called questions about his company's mail and collaboration strategy fair. He also maintains that the battle has moved beyond mail per se.

"The priority here is on collaboration," Hovsepian told CRN in an interview at Brainshare. "GroupWise is a great mail system, but where the market's going is real-time collaboration. Our strategy was to make sure we announce Teaming and Teaming Plus Conferencing. That will become the new backplane for the customer."

IDC analyst Mark Levitt pointed out one flaw in that strategy: If RTC is such a linchpin, shouldn't Novell at least own that technology? Novell could end up buying SiteScape, Maynard, Mass., to resolve that issue, he said.

As for the collaboration-as-the-center-of-the-universe statement, Microsoft, Cisco and IBM clearly have already signed on. All three have talked up their own RTC and "unified communications" game plans in recent months.

At the same time, Novell is playing the modularity card, saying it expects to sell GroupWise into otherwise Microsoft shops. Likewise, Novell said partners can sell SiteScape to companies running Exchange Server but that resist the totalMicrosoft buy-in. In theory, then, Exchange Server shops would run SiteScape instead of SharePoint, and GroupWise shops could opt for SharePoint.

Several Novell executives at Brainshare said they see evidence of midsize and larger companies resisting the Microsoft Enterprise Agreement volume licenses.

Where Microsoft and its partner proxies paint the company's integrated stack as an unalloyed advantage, many companies that do not see the inherent advantage and may resist locking too much of their IT budget into one vendor.

NEXT: GroupWise hangs in

Novell cites Wyeth, the pharmaceutical giant, as an example of a large enterprise mail account. "We're very strong in government and health-care verticals, especially in state and local government," said Bill Pray, GroupWise product manager at Novell.

Pray added that the No. 3 slot in the collaboration arena is not a bad patch of land.

"I make the analogy of the gaming world, where Sony and Microsoft are No. 1 and No. 2, but Nintendo has more buzz," he said. "That's where we're playing in the collaboration world. We know we're a distant No. 3, but we're interesting to watch."

Costa Speliakos, president of EOS Systems, would agree. The Needham, Mass.-based VAR has stuck with GroupWise through thick and thin, although the company also does Exchange Server and IBM Domino work as needed.

Speliakos said Microsoft's CAL requirements with the new Exchange Server 2007 have made it a much pricier solution. The new Exchange requires a hardware upgrade for virtually all companies: It calls for 64-bit boxes.

EOS Systems has been retained by two companies this month to do Exchange-to-Groupwise migrations, Speliakos said. According to EOS comparisons, an Exchange upgrade would have cost one customer 40 percent more than migrating that customer to GroupWise because of the hardware requirements.

GroupWise's embrace of Linux, too, is a draw for many customers. "We're seeing more organizations starting to look at [Linux] to see how it fits," Speliakos said. "Is it rip and replace? For the desktop, no. But for back ends, it's definitely being evaluated."

In other anecdotal evidence, Gwava, a company that specializes in e-mail management and security for GroupWise, has seen its business grow 25 percent year over year, according to Richard Bliss, vice president of marketing.

Even some Microsoft partisans say the software giant's somewhat onerous Exchange Server upgrade path may help competitors.

"Exchange Server 2007 absolutely requires people to rebuild their mail from scratch," said Craig Carter, CTO of Micromenders, a San Francisco-based Microsoft partner.