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Novell And Netscape Give Birth To New Venture
By Bob Violino When Novell and Netscape Communications Corp. in late March announced plans to form Novonyx--a joint venture to develop intranet and extranet software for Novell platforms, they didn't create a huge amount of excitement. The bigger news that week, in fact, was Novell's selection of Eric Schmidt, former Sun Microsystems chief technology officer and one of the creators of Java, as its new chairman and CEO. Old News One reason for the lack of a response was t hat the proposed creation of Provo, Utah-based Novonyx had been rumored for months. Another reason was that the venture appeared to some to be just the latest anti-Microsoft alliance for a company with a long history of such corporate teamings. But analysts say the privately held Novonyx will be a key to Novell's attempt s to transform itself from a company known mainly for its network operating systems to one that will meet the demands of the increasingly Web-crazed networking market of the late 1990s.
Ultimately, Novonyx will port all 10 of the server products that make up SuiteSpot to IntranetWare, s ays Willie Donahoo, Novell's senior director of marketing for IntranetWare. Donahoo says Novonyx also will develop Java-based applications, although it's too soon to say when that will happen. "Novonyx will leverage all of the common standards, including Java and TCP/IP," he says. "The first goal is to get Enterprise Server and FastTrack Server for IntranetWare out by the fall, then we'll focus on the best ways to leverage Java." Industry observers have criticized Novell, which has a massive installed base of network servers and some 60 million users, for moving too slowly into the fast-growing intranet market. The link with Netscape should help. "Novonyx products will provide a migration from NetWare to intranets," Donahoo says. "It will help Novell customers accelerate the deployment of intranets. Everyone is deploying them, but the question is: How quickly can they leverage their NetWare investments with intranets?" Novell users can buy Netscape's SuiteSpot servers without deserting the NetWare platform in which they have made major investments, says Amy Wohl, president of consultancy Wohl Associates in Narbrith, Pa. The question is: Has Novell already missed the boat in the intranet market? "While Internet centrism may be the saving grace of [Novell's] server platform, they're way late on this--perhaps too late," says Bruce Robertson, program d irector of global networking strategies at the Meta Group, a consultancy in Stamford, Conn., and a columnist for this magazine. They didn't even get a commitment from Netscape to support Novell Directory Service (NDS) from non-NetWare Loadable Module (NLM)-based Netscape products, he says.
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The main business of Novonyx, at least early on, will be to port Netscape's SuiteSpot and FastTrack Web server software to Novell's IntranetWare platform. The first products, Netscape Enterprise Server and Netscape FastTrack Server for IntranetWare, are expected to begin beta tests in June and start shipping by the fall.
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News, Trends and Analysis by Kelly Jackson Higgins Internet You Say Tomato.com, I Say Tomato.jp by Christy Hudgins-Bonafield Updated May 23, 1997 |
