A Novel(l) Situation: Part II

What''s in a name? Well, nothing and

everything. This was realized recently by Novell Inc., still the world''s largest NOS

vendor. The company''s flagship product, its source of bread and butter, NetWare, which

became intraNetWare, is now again NetWare. These different avatars of the good ol'' NetWare

are now culminating into a package bundled with the browser and other value-adds from

partner Netscape.

NetWare has been a foghorn of Novell, ever

since networking for PCs got invented. And the amount of mindshare-as well as

marketshare-that it garnered in an era of Unix revolution, was obviously applaudable. Then

in mid-nineties came the huge concept-cum-reality called Internet. Novell was equally

confused as were the other software vendors, but the company chose to remain

non-committal. And then it was realized that it is not Internet, but intranet, which is

the huge business opportunity.

Novell, whose engineer was credited with

the coining of the name, intranet, came up with a product, IntranetWare-which was nothing

but another version of NetWare with intranet/Internet capabilities. Through this venture,

the company announced its arrival in the intranet age. But, the story has a twist here.

While on one hand it found that it was the only one to rename its flagship product, it was

also left with a huge customer base-confused between networking and intranet, and NetWare

and intraNetWare. By that time, Windows NT had established itself as not only a networking

product but also an intranet product.

Having realized its folly of tampering with

the name of its flagship product, which was perceived as different from NetWare, the next

version has been renamed as NetWare 5. The second beta of this product has been delivered

recently, with enhancements that include bundling of Netscape FastTrack Server, Netscape

Communicator, besides the famous Novell Directory Services (NDS). The full and final

version of NetWare 5 is expected to be released by mid-1998.

What happened was Novell couldn''t grow out

of the brand equity of NetWare in a self-defined short period of time. And intraNetWare

couldn''t be established as a competent product in itself. Hence users couldn''t associate

much importance to an upgrade which spelt out more about the additional features rather

than the functionality of the complete product itself.

A Microsoft Act



Now Novell is doing a Microsoft act by bundling Netscape Communicator into NetWare 5. In
fact, the company plans to be one up against Microsoft by incorporating Netscape FastTrack

Server, providing users with Web publishing features. The only difference is that the

products are from different vendors, as opposed to Internet Explorer and Windows OS being

from the same stable.

Novell is betting a lot on the current

version. What will be interesting to observe is how Novell takes on Bill Gates and

Microsoft with the reborn NetWare-and regain its lost glory in the process. And the NOS

heavyweight still has a large customer base, if one goes by the claims made by the

company. As John Slitz, Sr VP (Marketing), puts it, NetWare has about 77 million

customers. Also, the company web site describes NetWare 5 beta 2 as the arrival of ''Elvis''

limo''. Let''s see what happens when Elvis emerges from the limo-if it creates the same

euphoria!

SIVAKUMAR V,



in Delhi.