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Racing Against The Clock

by Christine Hudgins-Bonafield

N ovell is on deadline. It is watching the clock, full of adrenaline, and silently hoping the job will get done.

The job is supporting and providing applications. It represents Novell's future.

Many, maybe most, analysts believe Novell is simply too late to catch up. The Gartner Group forecasts virtually no revenue growth for Novell over the next five years. Newspapers are full of stories of Microsoft NT successfully replacing NetWare. The refrain is familiar: NetWare's superior file and print services are no longer enough.

But with a blueprint blessed by CEO Robert Frankenberg, Novell has mounted a multifaceted applications push that at least stands a chance.

Novell officials predict an early 1997 completion date for SuperNOS, which they promisewill be a finely tuned, secure, microkernel-based applications server. It is intended to run across many hardware platforms and provide the famous NetWare file and print performance.

Before SuperNOS ships, Novell promises to integrate NetWare and its UnixWare Advanced Server Products more tightly, as it pushes its UnixWare underdog into a PC-applications server market now led by the Santa Cruz Operation and Microsoft NT.

For those who confused the demise of the AppWare Foundation with the death of AppWare itself, Novell has news. Novell's Visual AppBuilder, redubbed AppWare, is intended to serve as a unified front door to NetWare, UnixWare and ultimately SuperNOS. Late last month, Novell was expected to announce the integration of App Ware with OpenDoc. The goal is to provide an easy-to-use tool to create the vertical applications that make up the bulk of today's application market, while moving toward the more open Applications Programming Interfaces (API) approach of OpenDoc.

Novell is also knee deep in projects to "componentize" existing applications, such as those going into GroupWise and PerfectOffice, with technologies such as AppWare and OpenDoc. The goal is to create an applications infrastructure that can be reassembled at a user's or VAR's discretion. The strategy also calls for minimizing redundant use of network and memory resources by asking applications developers to build upon specific underlying Novell services.

Across Novell, there seems to be a single message: Applications are the future. What remains to be seen is whether Novell is taking the right steps toward that future and whether it will arrive on time. Analysts have doubts on both counts.

Since its announcement this past fall, Novell's SuperNOS has become a lightning rod for criticism. SuperNOS is a microkernel-based architecture with a UnixWare and NetWare "personality" layered on top and services like NetWare Directory Services (NDS). AppWare and OpenDoc will provide a doorway into the architecture and the roof of this new structure may well turn out to be Novell's Tuxedo middleware. Novell has yet to announce its low-level application tools strategy.

While the concept of marrying NetWare file and print performance with solid applications support can be exciting, few Novell watchers believe the LAN leader can pull it off. Almost everybody claims to have a better idea.

Scott Winkler, vice president of operating systems research for the Gartner Group, says Novell should give up SuperNOS and put its NetWare capabilities directly into UnixWare. He asks if companies like IBM and Sun couldn't pull off microkernel technology, how can Novell do so? "Novell is being defensive about NetWare, and that will cause it to lose the offensive it needs for UnixWare," he says .

Jamie Lewis, president of the Novell-watching Burton Group, suggest that for Novell "to go from a preliminary architecture phase to a fully shipping product with all its tools and framework in roughly two years is cutting the time in half that it took Microsoft to develop NT." Novell may believe it can do that with SuperNOS, he says, but he isn't convinced. He suggests that Novell separate NetWare services from the operating system and be in both businesses.

Novell Replies

Joe Firmage, vice president of strategic development, says SuperNOS will meet its promised ship date of early 1997. He says Novell has been working with microkernel technology for more than two years and knows its way around the technology--even if it opts against Chorus Systems' microkernel, which has been used so far in most of its development work.

Firmage also argues that "There is a fundamental difference between what we are doing with SuperNOS and what Microsoft did with NT." Eighteen months ago Novell started with NetWare and UnixWare technology that is very mature, he says, so it isn't starting from scratch like Microsoft.

In fact, Firmage considers recent NetWare 4.1 and UnixWare 2.0 deliveries to be evolutionary steps toward SuperNOS--especially support for NetWare Directory Services in NetWare today and the promise of that support by year's end in UnixWare. File and print sharing directly from UnixWare is another key integration task that is expected to be delivered late this year or early next year.

Firmage says Novell already has devoted several hundred man-years to SuperNOS and has NetWare running on a microkernel architecture at a performance rate "no more than a few percentage points" from NetWare alone.

While Novell could put NetWare capabilities in UnixWare as Winkler urges, Firmage says the company is not doing so because it wants the hardware portability provided by a microkernel.

UnixWare in Obscurity

To cast UnixWare in the role of Novell's integrated NOS/applications server, moreover, w ould require a marketing push unprecedented in Novell's history. Computer Intelligence InfoCorp. predicts that by 1999 NT will command 43 percent of the $15,000-and-under server market and SCO Unix/Xenix will have 24 percent, while UnixWare and Sun's Solaris, each will have only six percent. Analysts say it would take a marketing miracle for UnixWare to become a power player in this market.

Novell officials say the UnixWare marketing team is about four times the size it was last year and is backed by 350 engineers. They concede, however, that they can't match the resources that Microsoft is devoting to NT.

The irony is that UnixWare seems to have real potential. Charles Phillips, at Morgan Stanley, says that he thinks UnixWare 2.0 is "technically better than NT, but it's probably the most undermarketed and underrepresented product inside Novell ever." Phillips joins other analysts in suggesting this is because Novell felt it had to cement its base by moving users to NetWare 4.1 before it pushed UnixWare. NetWare, he says, has always been Novell's top priority.

Phillips says 2.0's completely graphical installation can be accomplished in less than 12 minutes. Once up, 2.0 is easy to use and administer. Perhaps not as easy as NT, but Phillips believes it would be easier to Novell to replace UnixWare's Motif interface with a Windows front end than for Microsoft to match UnixWare's multiprocessor support. That scalability--which has been tested by Novell with eight processors and is being tested by third parties with 12 and 16 processors--is being touted by Novell.

NetWare and UnixWare Converge

UnixWare is already on its way toward integration with NetWare. The two NOSes have NetWare Open Data-Link Interface drivers and significant commonality in their APIs for multiprocessing. Patrick Smyth, director of marketing for Novell's USG, adds that the UnixWare 2.0 software developer kit "includes a fairly extensive set of NetWare APIs [for tasks such as connectivity and administration], so you can write a n application on UnixWare and it will know how to take advantage of NetWare." This doesn't mean UnixWare will run NetWare Loadable Modules. That isn't contemplated until SuperNOS.

NetWare is also beginning to look more like UnixWare. Full SMP support for NetWare is slated for mid- to late summer, and support for a 32-bit client is scheduled for later this year.

As for applications, Novell officials say UnixWare supports some 3,500--including ones that run on SCO and System 5.4, as well as database apps from Oracle, Informix and Sybase. SAS and Computer Associates Unicenter are also supported. At press time, sources said a deal with Lotus was also underway. In March, Novell began shipping a two-way gateway for its GroupWise product to Lotus Notes.

But analysts say what UnixWare lacks in the applications arena is something Novell seems to lack as a whole--a firmly grounded applications strategy and the tools to carry it forward. The consensus is that Novell has yet to provide a full-featured applications environment and adequate support for today's applications development tools. "It's no big deal if they have databases," says Winkler, "there are hundreds of other things missing: SAP R/3, [BMC's] Patrol and all kinds of middleware like IBM's CICS."

AppWare: An Exaggerated Death

There's also debate about the role Novell's AppWare will play in its applications strategy. While many analysts dismiss AppWare as simply one visual tool in the development haystack Novell needs to build, Tom Nolle, president of the Cimi Corp. consultancy, says he has been picking up hints that Novell plans to use a single applications interface for NetWare and UnixWare--one that would play off AppWare. He's also convinced that this unified approach is aimed squarely at attracting those vertical industry VARs that over time have become less technology savvy as they've specialized more and more in their particular fields.

Of course, today's AppWare is still a distance from that finish line. Visual AppBuilder began shippin g in November and was renamed AppWare in January when it was bundled with PerfectOffice. A standalone version of AppWare was slated to ship in April and to be priced at $199 through August.

Today, AppWare is an attempt to simplify applications development by providing a visual environment from which even power users can build "client" applications using specific NetWare and desktop services. In March, about 80 of these client services were available from Novell and third parties for Macintosh and Windows clients.

By the end of the year, Novell "hopes" to extend the AppWare architecture in a beta release to full distributed computing support. Ed Firmage, director of marketing for the NetWare development tools group, says, "What we are looking to do with the AppWare distributed bus is to allow you to arbitrarily segment an application into a client piece and a server piece so that the server piece could run on a server or another desktop machine."

Ed Firmage, brother to Joe Firmage, says that "this allows for a more open distributed paradigm," although in many cases--especially when a Unix server is used--customers will prefer more conventional servers.

"With this in place," says Firmage, "you could have a client application talking to a NetWare Loadable Module (NLM) running under NetWare that also simultaneously talks to another application build in AppWare running on a Unix server and maybe another piece of it will talk to a mainframe using any one of the server connectivity options on that side."

While distributed AppWare was initially targeted for beta by year's end, the timetable for that work is being affected by the priority Novell is giving to the integration of AppWare and OpenDoc.

OpenDoc: The Hidden Architecture

Last month Novell was expected to outline an evolution from today's AppWare to OpenDoc. Essentially, AppWare would continue to provide a simple environment for building applications through SuperNOS, but increasingly it would be integrated with OpenDoc. The first step would be to enable AppWare to compile OpenDoc parts. This would let users--particularly vertical industry developers--rely on the more familiar AppWare Application Loadable Modules (ALMs as the underlying architecture shifted to OpenDoc.)

"We'll preserve the ALM environment as long as it is necessary to do so," says Firmage. "AppWare will remain with SuperNOS, but by that time the underlying architecture will be OpenDoc." As for Microsoft MAPI support, Firmage says he expects to see ALMs developed by third parties that will let users rely on MAPI in "application-specific ways."

Firmage also says to expect announcements concerning low-level programming tools to help fill out the applications focus. Although he admits that AppWare isn't the whole picture, he does say Novell is emphasizing AppWare because if "you look at the sheer number of business specific applications, they outnumber the horizontal apps by at least an order of magnitude." Similarly, he says, businesses are being challenged as part of downsizing to recreate company-specific client/server applications that once ran on the mainframe.

Application Services

Novell's efforts to pull, stretch, break and recombine its own applications extends far beyond VARs, however. The goal is to create underlying application services that fit together with a minimum of duplication to create an underlying applications infrastructure.

For Novell itself, says Joe Firmage, the ultimate goal is to extend the single network image that occurs today with NDS in NetWare 4.1 to every other major network service.

As prelude to the applications integration of SuperNOS, Firmage says to expect the following on NetWare: the Collaborative Message Server that combines Novell's GroupWise and MHS to be delivered late this year; the enhancement of existing services or addition of new services by AT&T and Novell to support Internet access; and the delivery of a compound document server with full object storage capabilities similar to Microsoft's promised Cairo revision of NT.

Other Novell officials say to expect integrated document, workflow, forms and messaging along with the MHS and GroupWise integration within the next 20 months. Database integration will also be part of this effort.

From the UnixWare standpoint, Joe Firmage says to expect common administration utilities, agents and applications between UnixWare and NetWare; tighter file and print integration in the next UnixWare release; and NDS support in UnixWare by year's end. He also says to expect network enabled applications, especially from Novell's groupware division.

Mark Calkins, vice president and general manager of the business applications group, says Novell's integration efforts already mean Novell's applications "are easier on Windows systems resources." Calkins talks about reducing the high cost of managing applications in a client/server environment by having those apps rely on existing network services and even application components, such as a universal addressbook or telephony service.

Calkins says to expect--probably within the next nine months--Novell's apps to use common configuration files in PerfectOffice, linked to a pointer in NDS, so that users can obtain their home configuration when they move about. He also says to expect licensing, metering and management based on flash memory technology.

While Novell's entire application suite may not be componentized within three years, he says to expect six to seven applications that reflect this trend in the next PerfectOffice release.

What can be expected from Novell's overall applications push? The vision and the blueprints are in place. The rest will hinge on three factors: Whether Novell's engineers deliver on the promise in the specified timetable, whether users understand and appreciate the vision and whether third-party software developers buy into the strategy.

Certainly the clay that Frankenberg flung into the corner as he sculpted a new vision for Novell has left an impression. There's a realization at Novell that the past is not th e future--and that is a powerful motivator.

Christine Hudgins-Bonafield can be reached at cbonafield@nwc.com.