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THE NETWORKOLOGIST / PATRICIA SCHNAIDT

Provo Pilgrimage

Gone is Ray Noorda's mission statement to grow the industry. In its place is a directed effort to connect people and their information at any time, anywhere. The network computing market has matured into a real business focus. To put Novell's mission in numeric terms, Frankenberg wants to have one billion NetWare users by the year 2000. The goal is pervasive computing, and the renewed drive to achieve NetWare everywhere is apparent, even from the way the Novell employees talk about Frankenberg and his vision: Not with a grandfatherly affection, but from a pointed understanding that the products that they manage must perform to market and financial success. To wit: When Frankenberg took the reins last April, Novell had 126 products, and 19 were turning a profit.

Desktop and groupware applications, access to the network, network services, network infrastructure, management and the tools to accomplish them are Novell's guiding light. Products that fit within that framework and are profitable get funded. The rest get sold off. The network is not pervasive and it's not easy to use. Novell is striving to change that.

Directory services are Novell's newly sharpened sword. Network managers are spending time they don't have adding, deleting and moving users from multiple applications and from the network. What devices are on the network is anyone's guess. A centralized directory of users, devices, applications and services will reduce networks' cost and complexity, and allow networks to be used by more nontechnical companies and users than is possible today.

So far, few third-party products have taken advantage of the NetWare Directory Service (NDS) in NetWare 4.1. Of course, companies are just starting to take NetWare 4.1 seriously. Novell is laboring to integrate its own messaging, groupware, management and other applications into NDS. For example, GroupWise will use NDS as its own directory by year's end. The PerfectOffice suite of desktop applications will fit into the NDS framework with the software's next major release (Novell wouldn't commit to a date.) The SoftSolutions folks are also vague but contend that a tighter integration among their document management software, NDS and Novell's desktop applications make perfect sense.

NDS won't live in the interoperable world by Novell alone. Novell is heavily recruiting developers to incorporate NDS support into their applications. In the process, Novell found a recycled use for AppWare. The AppWare Loadable Modules represent components, such as NDS or bindery services, thus easing the process of adapting software to NDS.

While directory, file, print and messaging are standard network services, Novell, with its Tuxedo, considers transaction processing a core network service. If the new Novell wants to make it easier to network, there's no better place to start than with building client/server applications. Tuxedo is a sophisticated development environment for building synchronous and asynchronous transactions. It's even slated to run on NetWare this year.

NetWare in Your Car?

NEST will be embedded into office machines, of which faxes and printers are the most obvious. Novell actually has a very practical reason for NEST here: The NetWare 4.x client cannot be reverse engineered, as you could with NetWare 2.x and 3.x clients, and faxes and printers are typically made clients on NetWare through this process. So Novell released the NEST developer kit late in early '95. QMS and Cannon should have NEST-enabled devices shipping by the time you read this column. NEST will show up in some less in-your-face locales, including for HVAC control in buildings, set-top boxes, credit-card readers and perhaps even utility meters. NEST devices show up in the NDS tree.

NEST is NetWare that plugs into the kernel of a real-time embedded operating system and uses the IPX transport. All that can be placed into a ROM. The overall market for NEST is huge but that market exists in many vertical niches. Vertical markets are notoriously hard to penetrate, and 500,000 NEST nodes in five years is aggressive.

SuperNOS is one of Frankenberg's main initiatives for Novell. If you've not heard, SuperNOS is Novell's future distributed NOS built around an object framework, somewhat akin to Microsoft's Cairo, the other pretender to the object-oriented NOS throne. SuperNOS is intended to solve Novell's multiple OS personalities and unite NetWare and UnixWare into a "superNOS" that will run both NetWare Loadable Modules (NLMs) and Intel Unix applications. SuperNOS is several releases of NetWare 4 and UnixWare 2 away. In the meantime, Novell will continue to enhance its bifurcated products.

One intriguing plank in the Novell access platform is the AT&T Network Connect Services, which is a commercial Internet service that is being developed by AT&T and Novell. Novell announced this initiative quite some time ago, but Frankenberg put it at the top of the company's to-do list. The goal is for companies to subscribe to the NetWare Connect Services and be provided reliable, billable and secure enterprise services-services that are all lacking on today's Internet frontier. It's not Microsoft's Marvel, but it is for hard-core corporate networks.

Network Friendly

While working to move its e-mail market share into the double digits, the Groupware division is also laboring on some longer-term projects, such as the Telephone Access Server, which is one step to making the universal mailbox a thing of reality. The Telephone Access Server lets users retrieve e-mail messages over the phone, which are read to them in an exceedingly synthesized computer voice. Yes, HAL, I got my messages. The Telephone Access Server is clunky so far, but it's not slated to ship until year's end.

On the access front, Novell is working on new ways to access networks, including to and from the Internet, from mobile clients and from NetWare Connect Services.

Novell's executives may have moved up the road only a few miles, but that move does mark a rebirth.

Patricia Schnaidt can be reached at pschnaidt@nwc.com.