‘One Net will be on top’

Nelson is a key driver of Novell’s product architecture and the company’s

positioning as a provider of Net services software

He has come long way since his programming days at IBM. Scaling the installed

base of GroupWise from 800,000 to 8 million is one of his significant

achievements. But it has been a while since then... Now, Stewart Nelson, COO and

executive vice-president, Novell Inc, manages the business operations of the

company and oversees product development, marketing, sales and service. Also,

with Novell’s One Net strategy coming into force and the acquisition of

Cambridge Technology partners, Nelson has his hands full. Excerpts from an

exclusive interview with him:

What is Novell’s current position in the market? How do customers

perceive the company? What would you say is the positioning of the company

today?

At BrainShare last year, we came out with the One Net vision and the mission

of Net services software. As we did at BrainShare a year ago and what we

continue to do today is to position Novell as the One Net solutions provider.

Putting it simply, we believe that with the One Net Strategy, we can be a

significant provider of solutions that will make the Net run.

You mentioned that the directory is the fundamental block for the One Net

solution. The directory has a good track record and has been available for a

while. However, isn’t it risky to bet on the directory alone?

Most people today, do not question the importance of a

directory in terms of technology. I think that people today recognize that you

have to have a directory to make things work. May be, three years ago it would

have been a risk to depend on the directory, but today it is a safe bet.

Could you give an example of the importance of the

eDirectory in the industry?

Let me explain that with an example of Novell’s Zero Day

Start. The concept of Zero Day Start is to feed in all the information about an

employee so that it can be synchronized with the rest of the systems in the

company. Think of the systems that maintain records of students in a college or

a university. With Zero Day Start, just imagine how efficient the university’s

system would be. Put in the student’s name once and it will be registered in

all records in the university whether it is needed or not. There are several

other cases where the directory is a key element in making these things work.

The possibilities are endless.

You spoke of the current market opportunity of $78.3

billion. How much of that share is Novell likely to take?

The answer to this could be debatable. We certainly believe

that we are not likely to make $78.3 billion in the next three years! The $78.3

billion market is not all ours. We do not have products and services in every

segment of that market.

However, the potential for growth in the next three years is

very high. I think we can grow between 20 or 30%. When you even look at things

like the directory and net management, $20 to $30 million dollars could be a

realistic figure for the next three to five years. It will all depend on how we

execute the strategy.

Novell has always taken the product selling approach. With

Cambridge Technology partners coming in, Novell is entering a solution selling

approach. How will this affect your existing partners who are used to product

selling? Do you have a new partnering strategy?

We do not have a new partnering strategy. We launched a new

partnering strategy about six months ago to work with CSI and we plan to

continue to execute that.

CSI has a strategic role to play as an e-business integrator.

What Cambridge brings to the table is a company that knows

how to sell some pretty nice vertical solutions. It turns out that most of our

CSI partners don’t have a solutions approach in the vertical market. So

probably, there won’t be a lot of overlap in the beginning. Besides, Novell

believes that it is just as important to maintain a relationship with our

existing partners even as we build new relationships.

Third-party software is a critical element for a platform’s

success. What is the third party support on the Novell platform? What plans do

you have to attract more developers to the Novell platform?

There has been a paradigm shift in targeting developers. In

the past, getting lots and lots of developers was seen as the way to go. I think

the future lies in working with partners who can put your products together as

solutions and actually help in developing solutions. So we are trying to build

relationships with eBusiness integrators who will combine our products with

other products and create a solution.

Why was Volera hived off as a separate company? It is now

a wholly owned subsidiary of Novell. What was the reason for doing that? How

will this benefit your customers?

A part of the problem with the market today is that we do not

get evaluated for the new things that we’re doing. People evaluate us

according to NetWare and that is all. We split Volera off so that the market

begins to understand that we have more than NetWare inside the company. That is

important to us at this stage. And we’ll be creating a stock for that over the

next few years. This will help our shareholders reap rewards as well and push

our stock prices to higher levels.

The eDirectory runs on seven platforms. Are other Novell

products available on other platforms as well?

Consider the architecture that we have. We have some

platforms at the bottom, the directory in the middle and then we have the

products, that actually run on top of the directory. Because the directory runs

on all those platforms, so do all our products. They all run on the eDirectory.

The eDirectory is the glue that sits between the platforms and the services

offering. Services all run on top of the eDirectory. So if you have the

eDirectory on those platforms, it works fine. And that is our USP–we offer the

glue that makes it stick.

Anil Chopra at BrainShare 2001, Salt Lake City