Novell president plots company’s return - solomonstrel1937

Two decades ago, Novell's network operational system of rules software system was almost ubiquitous in the enterprise. Now, its new president wants to restore Novell to a similar level of prominence.

"The Novell Corporation was erstwhile one of the top IT providers in the world. But onetime in the mid-1990s, it cursed its way," admitted Bob Flynn, Novell's president and general manager, in an interview with IDG News Service. Flynn's goal is to have got Novell again perceived every bit "a high quality, sophisticated technology provider for IT infrastructure."

Novell has kept a fairly reduced profile since it was purchased by Attachmate 2 years agone for $2.2 1E+12. Merely starting this month, Novell is commencing a vigorous gross sales campaign to draw new customers.

The road back volition non, however, be an easy one for Novell, analysts said.

"Since the Attachmate acquisition, Novell has been asleep at the roulette wheel in respective competitive markets," said Hyoun Park, principal analyst at IT research firm Nucleus Research. "Novell will deman to focus immediately connected modernizing its post. It needs to start thinking about how social networking, the iPhone, and edge application environments are dynamical how technology is utilized."

"The fact is that Novell's traditional focus areas—collaboration and complex IT direction processes—continue to resonate in today's more and more interlacing line of work environments," said Charles King, of the Pund-IT IT analysis firm, by email. "However, those core processes are evolving radically due to the broad adoption of devices like smart phones and tablets."

Novell made its name, and is unsurpassable known today, for its NetWare network in operation system. NetWare provided a way to link individual computers to a local arena meshwork, before that feature came built in with Microsoft Windows. As offices upgraded to computers running the meshwork-ready Windows 95 or newer operating systems, the need for NetWare faded. The company repositioned itself as offering enterprise infrastructure software, and enjoyed or s success with products such as the GroupWise messaging and coaction suite.

Since being purchased away Attachmate, which successful Novell a private company and kept it as a stand-lone subsidiary, Novell has shifted its strategy. "The first thing we needed to dress was get our customers settled gage in and reconstruct their confidence about what Novell was doing," Flynn said. "Before the acquisition, these customers were not receiving a lot of love, so to speak."

To get wind Flynn tell IT, Novell lost its agency Eastern Samoa a national companionship in part because of pressures from investors. It was already troubled to regain the uncomprehensible momentum when NetWare fell from favor. At its zenith in 1995, Novell's revenues indisposed at $1.63 billion, though by 2022, period of time revenue shrank to $811 million.

"Some of the core products—those that were generating the most measure of revenue and had the largest installed pedestal—were actually receiving the least amount of attention internally, because they weren't products that could drive up shareholder value," he aforesaid.

Flynn didn't mention what these products were, though, in the acquisition, Attachmate, which is a holding company, split the teams managing the Novell NetIQ security measures management and Suse Linux distribution product brands off A their own stand unequalled divisions.

And since Attachmate took Novell snobbish, Novell has concentrated on ensuring that existing customers are satisfied with their Novell experience. It besides channeled the troupe's engineering expertise into strengthening its core products, notably the NetWare successor Open Enterprisingness Server, the Zenworks contour management package, and GroupWise. "We want to leverage the strength of Novell from a technology standpoint," Flynn aforementioned.

Overall, the companionship wish focussing connected the technology areas it knows best and for which information technology is best known—file, networking and print management, collaboration, and endpoint management. "We want to continue to stay inside those categories, but we want to modernize those technologies," Flynn said.

The party faces formable competitors, however. Novell's GroupWise, for instance, mustiness vie against IBM Connections, Swing music Computer software's offerings, and Microsoft's Lync, Exchange, Outlook and Yammer. "There are heavy hitters in this space, which are putt a lot of money into toughened customer acquisition and customer loyalty efforts," Parking lot said. "Novell has extraordinary interesting pieces, but they must play beguile up."

Since beingness purchased by Attachmate, the company has issued 86 product release updates. It unveiled extraordinary new and updated technologies at its yearbook BrainShare users conference in February. There, the company demonstrated a importantly upgraded version of File out Reporter, which is software that reports happening file usage and security. The newly released variant 2 integrates access rights into the reports, drawing user information from Microsoft Active Directory and Novell's own eDirectory.

"We'Re really expanding the capabilities of what we can report on with this product. Not but can we report on what is being stored and accessed, you bet old the files are, but also who has approach rights to these particular files," said Dollar Gashler, a Novell marketing manager.

Are these efforts enough? Some say the caller is inactive not doing enough in emerging spaces such as mobile and the cloud.

"Overall, I think Novell is on the right track simply if it is to exist and thrive, the company needs to with success transform itself to meet new these challenges," King over.

Flynn admits that the companionship doesn't have the resources yet to pursue all the Major trends in the marketplace. The company has been busily expanding its products, such as iPrint, for maneuverable and BYOD ("bring your own twist") usage. But Novell allay needs to overtake the IT industry's shift to cloud computing.

"We are developing what our cloud strategy looks ilk. I'd like to be further along in my cloud capabilities than we are today, but there was some things I needed to do first. I could innovate without them, just I realize that ultimately we need to get there," Flynn admitted.

Prior to taking the helm at Novell, Flynn oversaw Attachmate, a terminal emulation software business unit of The Attachmate Group. He joined Attachmate in 1998 after spending 17 years at IBM in single management roles.

But because Flynn is a long metre Attachmate executive, Car park is skeptical that Flynn is a suitable choice for leading Novell punt to prominence. "There seems to exist a mismatch between a guy World Health Organization has focused connected things like-minded terminal emulation just who directly has assets supported on cloud, changeful, social. These are all very trendy and require a very modern mindset."

"Bobfloat Flynn might be the right guy, but to effectively sell Novell He must use a very different mindset than what he has traditionally done with Attachmate," Park same.

Despite the challenges, Flynn remains overconfident in his mission to put the company back happening top.

"My task is to reconstruct the brand, institute it clog to the level it was before," Flynn said. "That's the instruction we're going in, and we'll be pretty relentless roughly it until we feel we get there."