Novell's GroupWise, The Cost Advantages of Directory Services
When it comes to cost-effectiveness in a full-featured messaging system, Novell's GroupWise is seemingly the sweetheart of the analytical community.

Tom Austin, Gartner Group Fellow and vice president, conducted a study of more than 300 businesses leads him to conclude that GroupWise planning, implementation and operations expenses are less than Exchange by two to one. If you disregard Austin's caveat that many costs of GroupWise administration are buried in NetWare administration, the median Exchange cost per client comes up 3.5 times that of GroupWise.

Creative Networks' surveys also show GroupWise users to be more productive than other messaging system users on a variety of tasks, such as document management and information sharing. There are, studies, too, putting GroupWise second only to Lotus Notes in terms of installed base.

So, what's wrong with this picture? Why isn't GroupWise selling beyond the installed base of Novell NetWare users, and why do analysts, competitors and many businesses consider Novell an also-ran in the race toward next-generation messaging systems?

One explanation is, despite a lot of lip service, TCO (total cost of ownership) seems to have a rather low priority in IT buying decisions. An April InformationWeek telephone survey of 200 user organizations found that purchase price and total cost of ownership were among the bottom three of eight factors in choosing a consolidated messaging system. Reliability hit the top of the list, followed by NOS integration.

Still, GroupWise doesn't seem to have a problem with reliability, and it's integrated with a NOS. In fact, Austin credits a large portion of GroupWise's low TCO to reduced administrative staffing needs that flow from Novell Directory Services.

Austin's examination of TCO for more than 300 organizations shows, in fact, that the most popular user profile is one demanding basic functionalityże-mail, calendaring and scheduling exclusively. Exchange, he says, may be more extensible, but most users aren't tapping that extensibility. That means on a function-for-function basis, GroupWise clobbers Exchange. (The analysis examines planning, implementation and operation costs for a 5,000-user system with a three-year life and puts annual per user cost at about $45 for GroupWise, $61 for Exchange and $157 for Notes; software, hardware and maintenance are excluded from the analysis.)

On the other hand, Austin doesn't really see GroupWise as a Lotus/Domino contender, since GroupWise is weak when it comes to collaboration; the defining characteristic of another user profile in which Lotus and Exchange will increasingly go head-to-head.

Then, what's the problem for GroupWise? It seems to be that messaging isn't tactical anymore. Businesses are using it to drive a stake into the future. "GroupWise's failings lie with the expense to build applications on top of it," says Austin. "People aren't going to do it, and they won't find third parties with the skills or products to fit and support it. The collaboration technology within GroupWise is also the weakest. Finally, while GroupWise has strong appeal to the NetWare base, part of its cost savings is the integration of management and directory services. Those advantages aren't present if you run GroupWise on NT."

Tony Ioele, CEO of turnkey messaging provider I/G OpenWare, thinks Novell has a problem in that its marketing positioning is almost parallel to Notes and Exchange and "in that situation, nine times out of 10 they'll lose."

Ioele says he has come across only one non-NetWare business interested in migrating to GroupWise and that was because of GroupWise's synergy with the organization's use of WordPerfect. "Unfortunately," he says, "we were speechless."

But Tom Rhoton, Novell's Director of GroupWise Product Marketing, comes out swinging. He says that "customers tell us they get 80 percent to 90 percent of the functionality of Notes immediately with GroupWise. That is why return on investment is high and cost of ownership is low. GroupWise doesn't require added programming staff. Workflow, imaging, calendaring, faxing, is all right there, right away. Our position is to be the product following the 80:20 rule. We'll give you 80 percent of the functionality you could think of at 20 percent of the cost. GroupWise is 20 percent of the cost of Notes."

Rhoton says studies from Creative Networks confirm that people use more of GroupWise's functionality than any other competing product and rate Groupwise more indispensable to business than Notes or Exchange.

Rhoton also argues with those who relegate GroupWise to a NetWare niche. If it's a niche, he contends, it's a big one, "the world's single largest market.

"There are very few companies running NT only," he says, "most still run a mixture of NetWare and NT." That being the case, he doesn't see the requirement that there be at least one NetWare machine running NDS in order to run GroupWise as a huge drawback. In addition, he says, Novell has announced NDS on Windows NT available later this year, so that NDS runs natively on an NT machine. The big advantage with NDS, says Rhoton, is that you can add a user account to the network within 30 seconds.

Rhoton also urges that GroupWise isn't exactly a dying product either. He quotes figures from IDC indicating that the GroupWise installed base grew from 8 million to 10.5 million during the second half of 1997. He believes a lot of those users are migrating from cc:Mail.