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Novell, Inc.

Type	Subsidiary
Industry	Computer software
Founded	1979
Key people	Dennis Fairclough Drew Major Dale Neibaur Kyle Powell
Products	Novell eDirectory Novell Open Enterprise Server Novell NetWare Novell GroupWise Novell ZENworks
Employees	3,600 (December 2009)
Parent	The Attachmate Group
Website	www.novell.com

Novell's current headquarters in Provo, Utah

Novell's former headquarters in Waltham, Massachusetts

Novell, Inc. /noʊˈvɛl/ is a software and services company. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of The Attachmate Group. It specializes in network operating systems, such as Novell NetWare; systems management solutions, such as Novell ZENworks; and collaboration solutions, such as Novell Groupwise and Novell Vibe.

Novell was instrumental in making the Utah Valley a focus for technology and software development. Novell technology contributed to the emergence of local area networks, which displaced the dominant mainframe computing model and changed computing worldwide. Today, a primary focus of the company is on developing open source software for enterprise clients.

History[link]

Novell owes its beginnings to the Eyring Research Institute (ERI) in Provo, Utah. Dennis Fairclough, Drew Major, Dale Neibaur and Kyle Powell left ERI and took with them the experience and technology to found Novell. Fairclough was the member of the original team that started Novell Data Systems. Major, Neibaur and Powell went on to form SuperSet Software. Fairclough was the original founder of Novell, who was dismissed when Ray Noorda came to Novell. Major, Neibaur and Powell continued to support Novell through their SuperSet Software Group.

At ERI, Fairclough, Major, Neibaur and Powell worked on government contracts for the Intelligent Systems Technology Project, and gained an important insight into the ARPANET and related technologies, ideas which would become crucial to the foundation of Novell.

ERI spawned many high-tech spin-offs, including WordPerfect, Novell, and Dynix in computers and some in the military and communication areas that have all benefited the world.

—Cleo Harmon, wife of the Founder and the Secretary of the President at Eyring Research Institute, The Life of Frank Carlyle Harmon, published 1999.

The company began in 1979 in Provo, Utah as Novell Data Systems Inc., a hardware manufacturer producing CP/M-based systems. It was co-founded by George Canova, Darin Field, and Jack Davis. Victor V. Vurpillat brought the deal to Pete Musser, chairman of the board of Safeguard Scientifics, Inc., who provided the seed funding. The micro computer that was produced by the company was comparatively weak against performance by competitors. In order to compete on systems sales Novell wrote a program to link more than one to operate micro computer together. The company initially did not do well, and both Davis and Canova left the firm. The Safeguard board then ordered Musser to shut Novell down. Musser contacted two Safeguard investors and investment bankers, Barry Rubenstein and Fred Dolin, who guaranteed to raise the necessary funds to continue the business as a software company. Novell's networking program could work on computers from other companies. They, along with Jack Messman, interviewed and hired Raymond Noorda. The required funding was obtained through a rights offering to Safeguard shareholders, managed by the Cleveland brokerage house, Prescott, Ball and Turben, and guaranteed by Rubenstein and Dolin.

In January 1983, the company's name was shortened to Novell, Inc., and Raymond Noorda became the head of the firm. Later that same year, the company introduced its most significant product, the multi-platform network operating system (NOS), Novell NetWare.

NetWare[link]

The first Novell product was a proprietary hardware server based on Motorola 6800 CPU supporting 6 MUX ports per board for a maximum of 4 boards per server using a star topology with twisted pair cabling. A network interface card (NIC) was developed for the IBM PC industry standard architecture (ISA) bus. The server was using the first network operating system (NOS) called ShareNet. Later, ShareNet was ported to run on the Intel platform and renamed NetWare. The first commercial release of NetWare was version 1.5.

Novell based its network protocol on Xerox Network Systems (XNS), and created its own standards from IDP and SPP, which it named Internetwork Packet Exchange (IPX) and Sequenced Packet Exchange (SPX). File and print services ran on the NetWare Core Protocol (NCP) over IPX, as did Routing Information Protocol (RIP) and Service Advertising Protocol (SAP).

NetWare uses Novell DOS (formerly DR-DOS) as a boot loader. Novell DOS is similar to MS-DOS and IBM PC-DOS, but no extra license for DOS is required; this came from the acquisition of Digital Research in 1991. Novell had already acquired Kanwal Rekhi's company Excelan, which manufactured smart ethernet cards and commercialized the internet protocol TCP/IP, solidifying Novell's presence in these niche areas.

It was around this time also that Ed Tittel of HTML For Dummies notoriety became involved with Novell. Tittel took up various positions within the newly acquired Excelan, becoming national marketing manager for Novell, before being named as Novell's director of technical marketing.

Novell did extremely well throughout the 1980s. It aggressively expanded its market share by selling the expensive ethernet cards at cost. By 1990, Novell had an almost monopolistic position in NOS for any business requiring a network.

With this market leadership, Novell began to acquire and build services on top of its NetWare operating platform. These services extended NetWare's capabilities with such products as NetWare for SAA, Novell multi-protocol router, GroupWise and BorderManager.

Beyond NetWare[link]

However, Novell was also diversifying, moving away from its smaller users to target large corporations, although the company later attempted to refocus with NetWare for Small Business. It reduced investment in research and was slow to improve the product administration tools, although it was helped by the fact its products typically needed little "tweaking" — they just ran.

In June 1993, the company bought Unix System Laboratories from AT&T,^[1] acquiring rights to the Unix operating system, seemingly in an attempt to challenge Microsoft. In 1994, Novell bought WordPerfect, as well as the Quattro Pro from Borland. These acquisitions did not last. Novell in 1995 assigned portions of its Unix business to the Santa Cruz Operation. WordPerfect and Quattro Pro were sold to Corel in 1996. Novell DOS was also sold to Caldera in 1996.

As Novell faced new competition, Noorda was replaced by Robert Frankenberg in 1994,^[2] and was followed by several CEOs who served short terms. One of Novell's major innovations at the time was Novell Directory Services (NDS), now known as eDirectory. Introduced with NetWare v4.0. eDirectory replaced the old Bindery server and user management technology employed by NetWare 3.x and earlier.

In 1996, the company began a move into internet-enabled products, replacing reliance on the proprietary IPX protocol in favor of a native TCP/IP stack. The move was accelerated when Eric Schmidt became CEO in 1997 and then Christopher Stone was brought in. The result was NetWare v5.0, released in October 1998, which leveraged and built upon eDirectory and introduced new functions, such as Novell Cluster Services (NCS, a replacement for SFT-III) and Novell Storage Services (NSS), a replacement for the Traditional/FAT filesystem used by earlier versions of NetWare. While NetWare v5.0 introduced native TCP/IP support into the NOS, IPX was still supported, allowing for smooth transitions between environments and avoiding the "forklift upgrades" frequently required by competing environments. Similarly, the Traditional/FAT file system remained a supported option.

However, by 1999, Novell had lost its dominant market position, and was continually being out-marketed by Microsoft, which gained access to corporate data centers by bypassing technical staff and selling directly to corporate executives. Microsoft worked to make NetWare look second place with Windows 2000 features such as Group Policy. Microsoft's GUI was also more popular and looked more modern than the character-based Novell interfaces. With falling revenue, the company focused on net services and platform interoperability. Products such as eDirectory and GroupWise were made multi-platform.

In October 2000, Novell released a new product, dubbed DirXML, which was designed to synchronize data, often user information, between disparate directory and database systems. This product leveraged the speed and functionality of eDirectory to store information, and would later become the Novell Identity Manager and form the foundation of a core product set within Novell.

In July 2001, Novell acquired the consulting company, Cambridge Technology Partners, founded in Cambridge, MA by John J. Donovan, to expand offerings into services. Novell felt that the ability to offer solutions (a combination of software and services) was key to satisfying customer demand. The merger was apparently against the firm's software development culture, and the finance personnel at the firm also recommended against it. The CEO of CTP, Jack Messman, engineered the merger using his position as a board member of Novell since its inception and soon became CEO of Novell as well. He then hired back Chris Stone as vice chairman and CEO to set the course for Novell's strategy into open source and enterprise Linux. With the acquisition of CTP, Novell moved its headquarters to Massachusetts.^[3]

In July 2002, Novell acquired SilverStream Software, a leader in web services-oriented application, but a laggard in the marketplace. The business area called Novell exteNd contains XML and Web Service tools based on Java EE.

Linux for Business[link]

In August 2003, Novell acquired Ximian, a developer of open source Linux applications (Evolution, Red Carpet and Mono). This acquisition signaled Novell's plans to move its collective product set onto a Linux kernel.

In November 2003, Novell acquired SuSE, a developer of a leading Linux distribution, which led to a major shift of power in Linux distributions. IBM also invested $50 million to show support of the SuSE acquisition. Within the openSUSE project, Novell continues to contribute to SUSE Linux. openSUSE can be downloaded freely and available as boxed retail product ^[4] with formal support.^[5]

In mid-2003, Novell released "Novell eNterprise Linux Services" (NNLS), which ported some of the services traditionally associated with NetWare to SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server (SLES) version 8.

In November 2004, Novell released the Linux-based enterprise desktop Novell Linux Desktop v9. This product was based on Ximian Desktop and SUSE Linux Professional 9.1. This was Novell's first attempt to get into the enterprise desktop market.

The successor product to NetWare, Open Enterprise Server, was released in March 2005. OES offers all the services previously hosted by NetWare v6.5, and added the choice of delivering those services using either a NetWare v6.5 or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server v9 kernel. The release was aimed to persuade NetWare customers to move to Linux.

Stagnation[link]

From 2003 through 2005 Novell released many products across its portfolio, with the intention of arresting falling market share and to move away from dependencies on other Novell products, but the launches were not as successful as Novell had hoped. In late 2004, Chris Stone left the company after an apparent control issue with then Chairman Jack Messman.^[6] In an effort to cut costs, Novell announced a round of layoffs in late 2005. While revenue from its Linux business continued to grow, the growth was not fast enough to stop the decrease in revenue of NetWare. While the company's revenue was not falling rapidly, it wasn't growing, either. Lack of clear direction or effective management meant that Novell took longer than expected to complete its restructuring.

In June 2006, chief executive Jack Messman and chief finance officer Joseph Tibbetts were fired, with Ronald Hovsepian, Novell's president and chief operating officer, appointed chief executive, and Dana Russell, vice-president of finance and corporate controller, appointed interim CFO.

"Your Linux is Ready"[link]

In August 2006, Novell released the SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 (SLE 10) series. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server was the first enterprise class Linux server to offer virtualization based on the Xen hypervisor. SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (popularly known as SLED) featured a new user-friendly GUI and XGL-based 3D display capabilities. The release of SLE 10 was marketed with the phrase "Your Linux is Ready", meant to convey that Novell's Linux offerings were ready for the enterprise. In late September 2006 Novell announced a real time version of SLES called SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time (SLERT) based on technology from Concurrent Computer Corporation.

[edit] Agreement with Microsoft

On November 2, 2006, Novell and Microsoft announced a joint patent agreement to cover their respective products.^[7][8] They also promised to work more closely, to improve compatibility of software, setting up a joint research facility. Executives of both companies hope such cooperation will lead to better compatibility between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org and better virtualization techniques.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said of the deal, "This set of agreements will really help bridge the divide between open-source and proprietary source software."^[9]

The deal involves upfront payment of $348 million from Microsoft to Novell for patent cooperation and SLES subscription. Additionally, Microsoft will spend around $46 million yearly, over the next 5 years, for marketing and selling a combined SLES/Windows Server offering and related virtualization solutions, while Novell will pay at least $40 million yearly to Microsoft, in the same period.^[10]

One of the first results of this partnership was that Novell adapted the OpenXML/ODF Translator for use in OpenOffice.org.^[11]

Reaction of FOSS community[link]

Initial reaction from members of the FOSS community over the patent protection was mostly critical, with expressions of concern that Novell had "sold out" and of doubt that the GPL would allow distribution of code, including the Linux kernel, under this exclusive agreement.^[12][13][14]

In a letter to the FOSS development community on November 9 2006, Bradley M. Kuhn, CTO of the Software Freedom Law Center described the agreement as "worse than useless."^[15] In a separate development the chairman of the SFLC, Eben Moglen, reported that Novell had offered cooperation with the SFLC to permit a confidential audit to determine the compliance of the agreement with the GPL (version 2).^[16] Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, said in November 2006 that changes coming with the version 3 of the GPL will preclude such deals.^[17] When the final revision of the third version of the GPL license was decided, the deal between Microsoft and Novell was grandfathered in. A new clause will let companies like Novell distribute GPLv3 software even if they have made such patent partnerships in the past, as long as the partnership deal was made before March 28, 2007 (GPLv3 Section 11 paragraph 7^[18]).

On November 12 2006, the Samba team expressed strong disapproval of Novell's announcement on November 2 2006 and asked Novell to reconsider.^[19] The Samba team includes an employee of Novell, Jeremy Allison, who confirmed in a comment on Slashdot that the statement was agreed on by all members of the team,^[20] and later quit his job at Novell in protest.^[21]

In early February 2007, Reuters reported that the Free Software Foundation had announced that it was reviewing Novell's right to sell Linux versions, and may even ban Novell from selling Linux, because of an agreement.^[22] However Eben Moglen later said that he was quoted out of context.^[23] He was explaining that GPL version 3 will be designed to block similar deals in the future. Currently, Novell is not violating the GPL version 2^[24] but the GPLv3 prevents such deals being made in the future.^[25] Microsoft has released two public covenants not to sue for the infringement of its patents when using Moonlight. The two covenants require the implementation to not to be released in GPLv3 .^[26][27]

Intelligent Workload Management[link]

In December 2009, Novell announced its intention to lead the market it identified as intelligent workload management (IWM).^[28] The company's products will enable customers to manage diverse workloads in a heterogeneous data center.

Acquisition by Attachmate[link]

Novell had long been rumored to be a target for acquisition by a variety of other companies. On March 2, 2010, Elliott Associates, L.P., an institutional investor with approximately 8.5% stock ownership of Novell, offered to acquire the company for $5.75 per share in cash, or $1 billion.^[29] On March 20, 2010, the company declined the offer and stated that the proposal was inadequate and that it undervalued the Company's franchise and growth prospects.^[30]

Novell announced in November 2010 that it had agreed to be acquired by Attachmate for $2.2 billion. Attachmate plans to operate Novell as two units, one being SUSE. As part of the deal, 882 patents owned by Novell are planned to be sold to CPTN Holdings LLC, a consortium of companies led by Microsoft^[31][32] and including Apple, EMC, and Oracle.^[33] According to Novell's SEC filing,^[34] the patents "relate primarily to enterprise-level computer systems management software, enterprise-level file management and collaboration software in addition to patents relevant to our identity and security management business, although it is possible that certain of such issued patents and patent applications read on a range of different software products".^[35] Additionally, the future owner anticipates no change to the relationship between the SUSE business and the openSUSE project as a result of this transaction.^[36]

On 27 April 2011, Novell announced that the merger with Attachmate had been completed, with Attachmate paying $6.10 per share in cash to acquire Novell. Immediately prior, Novell completed the sale of "certain identified issued patents and patent applications" to CPTN Holdings LLC for $450 million in cash.^[37] Novell is now a wholly owned subsidiary of The Attachmate Group, the parent company of Attachmate Corporation.

The U.S. Department of Justice announced that in order to proceed with the first phase of their acquisition of certain patents and patent applications from Novell Inc., CPTN Holdings LLC and its owners altered their original agreements to address the department's antitrust concerns. The department said that, as originally proposed, the deal would jeopardize the ability of open source software, such as Linux, to continue to innovate and compete in the development and distribution of server, desktop, and mobile operating systems, middleware, and virtualization products. With regard to licensing the patents:

• All of the Novell patents will be acquired subject to the GNU General Public License, Version 2, a widely adopted open-source license, and the Open Invention Network (OIN) License, a significant license for the Linux System;
• CPTN does not have the right to limit which of the patents, if any, are available under the OIN license; and
• Neither CPTN nor its owners will make any statement or take any action with the purpose of influencing or encouraging either Novell or Attachmate to modify which of the patents are available under the OIN license.

Concurrent with the closing of the acquisition, some of Novell's products and brands were transferred to another of Attachmate Group business units, NetIQ, and the SUSE Linux brand was spun off as its own business unit. The fourth business unit, Attachmate, was not directly impacted by the acquisition.

On April 2011, Attachmate announced layoffs for the Novell workforce, including hundreds of employees from their Provo Utah Valley center,^[38] raising questions about the future of some open source projects such as Mono.^[39][40]

Organization[link]

Novell is organized into product development, sales, and services divisions.

In December 2009, Novell reorganized its product development business units into two Business Units: Security, Management, and Operating Platforms; and Collaboration Solutions.^[41]

The Collaboration Solutions Business Unit is based around providing applications for office productivity products:

• GroupWise
• Novell Conferencing
• Novell Data Synchronizer
• Novell File Management Suite
• Novell File Reporter
• Novell Storage Manager
• Novell Vibe Cloud (discontinued and features merged into product 'Vibe', formerly Vibe OnPrem)
• Novell Vibe
• Open Enterprise Server

The Security, Management, and Operating Platforms Business Unit is based around the remainder of Novell's products (formerly separated into Systems and Resource Management, Identity and Security Management, and Open Platform Solutions business units):

• Novell eDirectory
• Novell Identity Manager (IDM) — manage access across a heterogeneous group of networks, systems, and information.
• Novell Access Manager — successor of Border Manager and iChain. Provides identity-based access to internal resources from inside or outside a given network, including web applications, SSLVPN applications, and so forth. Also includes federation based on Liberty and SAML.
• Novell BorderManager — Manages access to external websites from inside the corporate network based on identities and policies.
• Novell Sentinel — A Security Event Manager that provides event collection, automated correlation, analysis, and reporting and is now fully integrated with Identity Manager and other IDM solutions to provide visibility into user activities.
• Novell Secure Login — A Single Sign-On product. It is listed in the leader's quadrant in Gartner Magic Quadrant 2009 & 2010.
• Novell Service Desk — An ITIL Certified Service Management Product OEM'd from LiveTime Software, Inc.
• ZENworks toolset, which provides application and patch management for servers, desktops, and handheld devices and asset management for Windows and Linux.
• The PlateSpin portfolio, which provides virtualization and workload management tools, allowing data center operators to plan and implement virtualization projects, and provide ongoing workload protection using both software and the Forge disaster recovery appliance
• Novell Operations Center — solution to communicate service performance in alignment with business objectives, while controlling the infrastructure in the data center across physical, virtual and cloud environments.
• SUSE Linux Enterprise (Server, Desktop and related extensions)
• SUSE Studio
• LibreOffice (formerly OpenOffice.org)
• Mono

Novell are founding members of the Open Invention Network, a group of companies that acquires patents, with the aim to protect free and open source software against the threat of patent infringement cases.

Support system[link]

Novell has a wide array of web-based and phone-based support options for its customers. The Novell support website^[42] was named one of the "Ten Best Web Support Sites" in 2003 by the Association of Support Professionals (ASP). In 2003, Novell received an Outstanding Website Award in the WebAward Competition for their Cool Solutions website with a searchable database of advice, tools and problem fixes submitted by users from all over the world.^[43]

Novell also hosts support forums^[44] covering all of their products including SUSE Linux Enterprise, GroupWise, ZENworks and NetWare. Novell offers users both HTTP and NNTP access to the support forums and a search option.^[45] Whilst Novell encourages the use of these forums, it does not officially monitor these forums. The forums are maintained by SysOps^[46] that have a demonstrated competency with the various products and volunteer their time to try and help the wider community.

Novell maintains a number of wikis^[47] with up-to-date information on a number of its products. For instance, as new NetWare service packs are released the NetWare wiki^[48] is updated with tips and known issues with the service packs. In some cases, the service packs themselves will have their own wiki with information added from feedback provided in the support forums.

Acquisitions[link]

• Santa Clara Systems, Inc. — 1986
• Cache Data Products — 1986
• Softcraft — 1987
• CXI — 1988
• Excelan — 1989
• Digital Research — 1991
• International Business Software Ltd. — 1992
• Serius — 1993
• Unix System Laboratories — 1993
• WordPerfect & Quattro Pro (Borland) — 1994
• Netoria — 1999
• Novetrix — 1999
• JustOn — 1999
• PGSoft — 2000
• Novetrix — 2001
• Cambridge Technology Partners — 2001
• Callisto Software, Inc. — 2001
• SilverStream Software — 2002
• Ximian — 2003
• SuSE — 2003
• Salmon — 2004
• Tally Systems — 2005
• Immunix — 2005
• e-Security, Inc — 2006
• RedMojo — 2007
• Senforce — 2007
• Platespin — 2008
• SiteScape — 2008
• Command Control and Compliance Auditor, (Fortefi) — 2008
• Managed Objects, Inc. — 2008

Certification[link]

Novell is one of the first computer companies to provide certification to its products. They include:

• Certified Novell Administrator (CNA)
• Certified Novell Engineer (CNE)
• Certified Linux Professional 10 (CLP 10)
• Certified Linux Engineer 10 (CLE 10)

Products[link]

• Novell iFolder
• Mono
• Novell Access Manager (formerly iChain)
• Novell Client
• Novell Cloud Manager
• Novell Cloud Security Service
• Novell Conferencing
• Novell Data Synchronizer
• Novell eDirectory
• Novell Evolution
• Novell File Management Suite
• Novell File Reporter
• Novell GroupWise
• Novell Identity Manager
• Novell NetWare
• Novell Open Enterprise Server
• Novell Open Workgroup Suite
• Novell Open Workgroup Suite Small Business Edition
• Novell Operations Center
• Novell Secure Login
• Novell Sentinel
• Novell Sentinel Log Manager
• Novell Service Desk
• Novell Storage Manager
• Novell Vibe (formerly Novell Teaming)
• PlateSpin Forge
• PlateSpin Migrate
• PlateSpin Orchestrate
• PlateSpin Protect
• PlateSpin Recon
• Subscription Management Tool
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Thin Client
• SUSE Linux Retail Solution
• SUSE Studio
• ZENworks Application Virtualization
• ZENworks Asset Management
• ZENworks Configuration Management
• ZENworks Endpoint Security Management
• ZENworks Handheld Management
• ZENworks Linux Management
• ZENworks Network Access Control
• ZENworks Patch Management
• ZENworks Server Management

See also[link]

• SUSE Linux distributions
• SCO v. Novell
• Novell BrainShare

References[link]

External links[link]

• Novell
• Novell Blogs
• Attachmate, Novell's parent company
• Open Horizons — A co-operative EMEA body of international Novell User Groups
• Open Horizons UK — An active Novell User Group for UK customers