Novell, Inc. was an American software and services company headquartered in Provo, Utah, that existed from 1980 until 2014. Its most significant product was the multi-

platform Platform may refer to: Technology * Computing platform, a framework on which applications may be run * Platform game, a genre of video games * Car platform, a set of components shared by several vehicle models * Weapons platform, a system ...

network operating system A network operating system (NOS) is a specialized operating system for a network device such as a router, switch or firewall. Historically operating systems with networking capabilities were described as network operating systems, because they a ...

known as

Novell NetWare NetWare is a discontinued computer network operating system developed by Novell, Inc. It initially used cooperative multitasking to run various services on a personal computer, using the IPX network protocol. The original NetWare product in ...

. Under the leadership of chief executive Ray Noorda, NetWare became the dominant form of personal computer networking during the second half of the 1980s and first half of the 1990s. At its high point, NetWare had a 63 percent share of the market for network operating systems and by the early 1990s there were over half a million NetWare-based networks installed worldwide encompassing more than 50 million users. Novell technology contributed to the emergence of

local area network A local area network (LAN) is a computer network that interconnects computers within a limited area such as a residence, school, laboratory, university campus or office building. By contrast, a wide area network (WAN) not only covers a larger ...

s, which displaced the dominant

mainframe computing A mainframe computer, informally called a mainframe or big iron, is a computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications like bulk data processing for tasks such as censuses, industry and consumer statistics, enterpris ...

model and changed computing worldwide. Novell was the second-largest maker of software for personal computers, trailing only

Microsoft Corporation Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washingt ...

, and became instrumental in making

Utah Valley Utah ( , ) is a state in the Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. Utah is a landlocked U.S. state bordered to its east by Colorado, to its northeast by Wyoming, to its north by Idaho, to its south by Arizona, and to its ...

a focus for technology and software development. During the early to mid-1990s, Noorda attempted to compete directly with Microsoft by acquiring

Digital Research Digital Research, Inc. (DR or DRI) was a company created by Gary Kildall to market and develop his CP/M operating system and related 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit systems like MP/M, Concurrent DOS, FlexOS, Multiuser DOS, DOS Plus, DR DOS ...

Unix System Laboratories Unix System Laboratories (USL), sometimes written UNIX System Laboratories to follow relevant trademark guidelines of the time, was an American software laboratory and product development company that existed from 1989 through 1993. At first wh ...

, WordPerfect, and the

Quattro Pro Quattro Pro is a spreadsheet program developed by Borland and now sold by Corel, most often as part of Corel's WordPerfect Office suite. Characteristics Historically, Quattro Pro used keyboard commands close to those of Lotus 1-2-3. While ...

division of Borland. These moves did not work out, due to new technologies not fitting well with Novell's existing user base or to being too late to compete with equivalent Microsoft products, and NetWare began losing market share once Microsoft bundled network services with the

Windows NT Windows NT is a proprietary graphical operating system produced by Microsoft, the first version of which was released on July 27, 1993. It is a processor-independent, multiprocessing and multi-user operating system. The first version of Wi ...

operating system and its successors. Despite new products such as Novell Directory Services and

GroupWise GroupWise is a messaging and collaboration platform from Micro Focus that supports email, calendaring, personal information management, instant messaging, and document management. The GroupWise platform consists of desktop client software, which ...

, Novell entered a long period of decline. Eventually Novell acquired SUSE Linux and attempted to refocus its technology base. Despite building or acquiring several new kinds of products, Novell failed to find consistent success and never regained its past dominance. The company was an independent corporate entity until it was acquired as a wholly owned subsidiary by The Attachmate Group in 2011, which in turn was acquired in 2014 by Micro Focus International. Novell products and technologies are now integrated within various Micro Focus divisions.

History

Origins as a hardware company

The company began as Novell Data Systems Inc. (NDSI), a

computer systems A computer is a machine that can be programmed to carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as programs. These program ...

company located in

Orem, Utah Orem is a city in Utah County, Utah, United States, in the northern part of the state. It is adjacent to Provo, Lindon, and Vineyard and is approximately south of Salt Lake City. Orem is one of the principal cities of the Provo-Orem, Utah Me ...

that intended to manufacture and market small business computers, computer terminals, and other peripherals. It was co-founded by George Canova and Jack Davis, two experienced computer industry executives. While some later sources place the creation of Novell Data Systems as having happened in 1979, more contemporaneous sources are in accordance with it happening in August 1980. Canova became president of the new company and Davis was in charge of sales and marketing. The suggestion for the company's name came from Canova's wife, who thought it meant "new" in French (in fact the French word is either the masculine ''nouveau'' or the feminine ''nouvelle''). While future

Brigham Young University Brigham Young University (BYU, sometimes referred to colloquially as The Y) is a private research university in Provo, Utah. It was founded in 1875 by religious leader Brigham Young and is sponsored by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day ...

professor and

Eyring Research Institute Eyring Research Institute (ERI) was founded as an American non-profit organization, on September 6, 1972, in Provo, Utah. Carlyle Harmon established the Eyring Research Institute with Ronald G. Hansen as President. This institute did consul ...

(ERI) figure Dennis Fairclough was not a founder of Novell Data Systems, he did work with the company from its early days. A funding proposal was brought to Pete Musser, chairman of the board of

Safeguard Scientifics, Inc. Warren Van Dyke "Pete" Musser (December 15, 1926 – November 25, 2019) was the chairman of the Musser Group. He was the founder of Safeguard Scientifics, a venture capital firm that invested in technology companies. At the peak of the dot-com bu ...

, a Pennsylvania-based, technology-focused venture capital firm that was an offshoot of the older Safeguard Business Systems. Safeguard Scientifics believed that a new computer systems company could help the Business Systems company automate their accounting systems. Accordingly, Safeguard Scientifics provided over $2 million in seed funding, and they became the majority owner of Novell Data Systems. Canova also owned a significant portion of the new company. Novell Data Systems set up offices in a former carpet warehouse located in an obscure industrial park down the road from the largely vacant

Geneva Steel Geneva Steel was a steel mill located in Vineyard, Utah, United States, founded during World War II to enhance national steel output. It operated from December 1944 to November 2001. Its unique name came from a resort that once operated nearby on ...

works. By November 1980, they were placing display ads in the classifieds pages of Utah Valley newspapers, seeking to hire hardware and software engineers and other staff. At first the company began to grow rapidly. By mid-1981 the company was selling two products, the Nexus Series

microcomputer A microcomputer is a small, relatively inexpensive computer having a central processing unit (CPU) made out of a microprocessor. The computer also includes memory and input/output (I/O) circuitry together mounted on a printed circuit board (P ...

and the Image 800

dot matrix printer A dot matrix printer is an impact printer that prints using a fixed number of pins or wires. Typically the pins or wires are arranged in one or several vertical columns. The pins strike an ink-coated ribbon and force contact between the ribbon ...

. Orders began shipping during the second half of 1981. The computer product was based on the

Zilog Z80 The Z80 is an 8-bit computing, 8-bit microprocessor introduced by Zilog as the startup company's first product. The Z80 was conceived by Federico Faggin in late 1974 and developed by him and his 11 employees starting in early 1975. The first wor ...

microprocessor and the CP/M operating system. The company subsequently did not do well. The microcomputer produced by the company was late to an increasingly crowded market and was noncompetitive in terms of performance when it did arrive. According to one paraphrase of a Value Line report on Novell Data Systems as a whole during this period, their "revenue was minimal, but expenses were tremendous." Davis was fired from Novell Data Systems, a change that occurred in November 1981. In order to compete on systems sales, Novell Data Systems planned a program to link more than one microcomputer to operate together. The current or former BYU students Drew Major, Dale Neibaur and Kyle Powell, known as the SuperSet Software group, were hired to this task and began consulting for Novell during 1981. During the first calendar quarter of 1982, heavy costs continued to be incurred at Novell Data Systems, which resulted in management shuffles, organizational consolidations, and a significant

layoff A layoff or downsizing is the temporary suspension or permanent termination of employment of an employee or, more commonly, a group of employees (collective layoff) for business reasons, such as personnel management or downsizing (reducing the ...

. Canova was fired and Jack Messman, representing Safeguard Scientifics, was named president. The poor performance of Novell Data Systems resulted in losses being announced in April 1982 for the publicly-held Safeguard Scientifics and put pressure on that company's stock price. However, by this point the computer-linking work that the SuperSet group had produced was drawing considerable interest and Novell Data Systems was describing themselves as a company that made not just stand-alone microcomputers but also products for

local area networking A local area network (LAN) is a computer network that interconnects computers within a limited area such as a residence, school, laboratory, university campus or office building. By contrast, a wide area network (WAN) not only covers a larger ...

(LAN). The dual emphasis on hardware and software products continued for several months but continued to have troubled results, and in July 1982 another round of layoffs took place which resulted in the employee count being reduced from 50 people to 30. At that time Safeguard reported that it would be writing down $3.4 million in losses due to Novell Data Systems' switch from being a hardware company to a software company. Throughout 1982 there were further management shuffles with other people being named president of the company. Major, Neibaur, and Powell continued to support Novell through their SuperSet Software group. As Major later said, "It was great that our hardware was so lousy because that gave us the idea that hardware wasn't really where the value was." Two other important NDSI employees were strategist Craig Burton and communications specialist Judith Clarke. Despite its struggles, Novell Data Systems had a presence at the

COMDEX COMDEX (an abbreviation of COMputer Dealers' EXhibition) was a computer expo trade show held in the Las Vegas Valley of Nevada, United States, each November from 1979 to 2003. It was one of the largest computer trade shows in the world, usually ...

show in Las Vegas in November 1982; a man named Ray Noorda saw it and become interested in the company's potential.

Rise to networking dominance

A new company

On January 25, 1983, the company was incorporated under the shortened name of Novell, Inc. In April 1983, the appointment of Noorda as president and CEO of Novell, Inc. was publicly announced. Noorda was a veteran executive of

General Electric General Electric Company (GE) is an American multinational conglomerate founded in 1892, and incorporated in New York state and headquartered in Boston. The company operated in sectors including healthcare, aviation, power, renewable energ ...

and the past CEO of several other companies and had garnered a reputation as a turn-around expert. Messman was chairman of the board and continued to represent the interests of Safeguard Scientifics, which was still majority owner in the new Novell. The new Novell started with around 15 employees. Noorda emphasized that the file server product acquired from Novell Data Systems would be the heart of what the new Novell would be doing. Later that same year, the company introduced its most significant product, the multi-

(NOS),

. Funding for the new company was still an issue, and Musser contacted two Safeguard investors and brokers, Barry Rubenstein and Fred Dolan, who were with the Cleveland brokerage house Prescott, Ball and Turben, in these efforts. Rubenstein and Dolan eventually came up with the idea of a rights offering to Safeguard shareholders. Accordingly, in January 1985, Safeguard Scientifics made an initial offering of shares in Novell, Inc. to its own shareholders, at $2.50 a share. The sale brought Safeguard more than $5 million in cash, and Safeguard's ownership in Novell went from 51 percent down to 24 percent. Novell, Inc. began trading as an over-the-counter stock.

NetWare

The first Novell product was a proprietary hardware server based on the

Motorola 68000 The Motorola 68000 (sometimes shortened to Motorola 68k or m68k and usually pronounced "sixty-eight-thousand") is a 16/32-bit complex instruction set computer (CISC) microprocessor, introduced in 1979 by Motorola Semiconductor Products Sect ...

processor and using a star topology. This, with the

(NOS) on it, was known as Novell S-Net, or ShareNet, and it achieved some visibility; by April 1983, advertisements were seen in trade publications for third-party software products which stated they were compatible with Novell ShareNet. The company realized that making a proprietary solution in this sense was disadvantageous and looked instead to the

IBM PC The IBM Personal Computer (model 5150, commonly known as the IBM PC) is the first microcomputer released in the IBM PC model line and the basis for the IBM PC compatible de facto standard. Released on August 12, 1981, it was created by a tea ...

as an alternative platform. Now called NetWare, the network operating system was ported to run on an IBM PC XT with an

Intel 8086 The 8086 (also called iAPX 86) is a 16-bit microprocessor chip designed by Intel between early 1976 and June 8, 1978, when it was released. The Intel 8088, released July 1, 1979, is a slightly modified chip with an external 8-bit data bus (allow ...

processor and supported centralized, multitasking file and print services. By March 1984, Novell was putting out announcements about third-party products that worked with Novell NetWare. NetWare came on the computing scene just as the

was emerging as a market force and applications such as the

VisiCalc VisiCalc (for "visible calculator") is the first spreadsheet computer program for personal computers, originally released for Apple II by VisiCorp on 17 October 1979. It is often considered the application that turned the microcomputer from a ...

spreadsheet for the

Apple II The Apple II (stylized as ) is an 8-bit home computer and one of the world's first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products. It was designed primarily by Steve Wozniak; Jerry Manock developed the design of Apple II's foam-mold ...

were showing what microcomputers could do for businesses. There was an immediate demand for

that could make files and printers available across many PCs. In addition, the advent of the PC caused organizational changes within companies and enterprises and allowed Novell to find entryways into individual departments or regional facilities rather than having to convince upper management of the value of networking. Thus, Novell's timing was spot on. As the ''

New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'' subsequently wrote, "Novell, in one of those instances of serendipity and visionary thinking that are the stuff of personal computer legend, found itself in the right place at the right time." Partly in consequence of its design of running at kernel level ring 0 without regard for separate or protected address spaces, and thus not having the properties of a general-purpose operating system, NetWare was known for being very fast in operation. This trend continued into 1987 with the Advanced NetWare/286 release, which was well received within the industry. NetWare also excelled with respect to

computer security Computer security, cybersecurity (cyber security), or information technology security (IT security) is the protection of computer systems and networks from attack by malicious actors that may result in unauthorized information disclosure, t ...

considerations, supporting user- and group-based roles and volume- and file-level access restrictions, thus making it attractive to systems administrators. Novell based its

network protocol A communication protocol is a system of rules that allows two or more entities of a communications system to transmit information via any kind of variation of a physical quantity. The protocol defines the rules, syntax, semantics and synchroni ...

Xerox Network Systems Xerox Network Systems (XNS) is a computer networking protocol suite developed by Xerox within the Xerox Network Systems Architecture. It provided general purpose network communications, internetwork routing and packet delivery, and higher level ...

(XNS), and created its own standards which it named

Internetwork Packet Exchange Internetwork Packet Exchange (IPX) is the network layer protocol in the IPX/SPX protocol suite. IPX is derived from Xerox Network Systems' IDP. It also has the ability to act as a transport layer protocol. The IPX/SPX protocol suite was very ...

(IPX) and Sequenced Packet Exchange (SPX). These protocols were based on a

client–server model The client–server model is a distributed application structure that partitions tasks or workloads between the providers of a resource or service, called servers, and service requesters, called clients. Often clients and servers communicate ov ...

. File and print services ran on the

NetWare Core Protocol The NetWare Core Protocol (NCP) is a network protocol used in some products from Novell, Inc. It is usually associated with the client-server operating system Novell NetWare which originally supported primarily MS-DOS client stations, but later ...

(NCP) over IPX, as did

Routing Information Protocol The Routing Information Protocol (RIP) is one of the oldest distance-vector routing protocols which employs the hop count as a routing metric. RIP prevents routing loops by implementing a limit on the number of hops allowed in a path from so ...

(RIP) and Service Advertising Protocol (SAP). All of these NetWare protocols mapped to various layers of the

OSI model The Open Systems Interconnection model (OSI model) is a conceptual model that 'provides a common basis for the coordination of SOstandards development for the purpose of systems interconnection'. In the OSI reference model, the communications ...

. Starting in 1987, Novell began selling its own

Ethernet Ethernet () is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in ...

-based network adapter cards. These included the 8-bit NE1000, and then in 1988, the 16-bit NE2000. They priced them lower than cards from competitors such as

3Com 3Com Corporation was an American digital electronics manufacturer best known for its computer network products. The company was co-founded in 1979 by Robert Metcalfe, Howard Charney and others. Bill Krause joined as President in 1981. Metcalfe e ...

, whose card Novell had previously been distributing. By 1989, Novell's cards were being sold at a rate of 20,000 per month, aggressively expanding Novell's market presence. At that point, Novell transferred the NE1000/NE2000 business to Anthem Electronics, the firm that had actually been making them, but the cards remained branded as Novell products. As author James Causey would later write, "NetWare deserves the lion's share of the credit for elevating PC-based local area networks from being cute toys to providing powerful, reliable, and serious network services. NetWare was the first Intel-based network operating system to provide a serious alternative to mainframe-based server networks, providing critical reliability and security features needed in the modern enterprise." Novell acquired

Kanwal Rekhi Kanwal Singh Rekhi (born August 29, 1945) (Punjabi : ਕੰਵਲ ਰੇਖੀ) is an Indian-American businessperson. He was the first Indian-American founder and CEO to take a venture-backed company public on the Nasdaq stock exchange. Car ...

's company Excelan in 1989; Excelan manufactured smart Ethernet cards and commercialized the Internet protocol

TCP/IP The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the set of communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suit ...

, solidifying Novell's presence in these areas. The acquisition combined Novell's $281 million in annual revenue with Excelan's $66 million. Rekhi became a high-ranking Novell executive, and played an influential strategic and managerial role with the company over the next several years. Excelan was based in

San Jose, California San Jose, officially San José (; ; ), is a major city in the U.S. state of California that is the cultural, financial, and political center of Silicon Valley and largest city in Northern California by both population and area. With a 2020 popul ...

, and they, along with a couple of prior Novell acquisitions, formed the basis for Novell's presence in

Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that serves as a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical areas San Mateo Count ...

going forward.

NetWare 386

A key software introduction came in 1989 with the release of NetWare 386, also known as

NetWare 3.0 NetWare is a discontinued computer network operating system developed by Novell, Inc. It initially used cooperative multitasking to run various services on a personal computer, using the IPX network protocol. The original NetWare product in ...

, which gave NetWare more modern architectural qualities, in conjunction with new capabilities in the

Intel 386 The Intel 386, originally released as 80386 and later renamed i386, is a 32-bit microprocessor introduced in 1985. The first versions had 275,000 transistors All the while it maintained its character as a dedicated network operating system rather than containing network capabilities as part of a general-purpose operating system. The NetWare kernel's ability to dynamically load and unload drivers was greatly appreciated by users and the ability to write NetWare Loadable Modules (NLMs) in the

C programming language ''The C Programming Language'' (sometimes termed ''K&R'', after its authors' initials) is a computer programming book written by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, the latter of whom originally designed and implemented the language, as well as ...

was also a significant benefit. NetWare 3 supported interactions with Apple's

Macintosh The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and software en ...

computers as well as with

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

-based workstations, thus enabling NetWare to expand upon file and print sharing towards accessing business-critical data within companies. This allowed NetWare to work with database products from companies such as

Oracle Corporation Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation headquartered in Austin, Texas. In 2020, Oracle was the third-largest software company in the world by revenue and market capitalization. The company sells da ...

and

Sybase Sybase, Inc. was an enterprise software and services company. The company produced software to manage and analyze information in relational databases, with facilities located in California and Massachusetts. Sybase was acquired by SAP in 2010; ...

. An analyst for

Dataquest ''Dataquest'' is an Indian magazine focused on information technology related articles. The magazine is published monthly by Cyber Media India Ltd, South Asia South Asia is the southern subregion of Asia, which is defined in both geogr ...

said that NetWare 386 "is truly a blow-away-the-competition type product". Overall, NetWare 3 was the most significant rewrite that the product would ever get, and proved very successful. By 1990, Novell had an almost

monopolistic A monopoly (from Greek el, μόνος, mónos, single, alone, label=none and el, πωλεῖν, pōleîn, to sell, label=none), as described by Irving Fisher, is a market with the "absence of competition", creating a situation where a speci ...

position in NOS for any business requiring a network. There were competitor companies in the same space, such as Corvus Systems, Banyan Systems, and

LANtastic LANtastic is a peer-to-peer local area network (LAN) operating system for DOS and Microsoft Windows (and formerly OS/2). The ''New York Times'' described the network, which permits machines to function both as servers and as workstations, as al ...

, but none of them made much of a dent in Novell's business. Microsoft tried on two early occasions to take on Novell in networking, first with the MS-NET product and then with

LAN Manager LAN Manager is a discontinued network operating system (NOS) available from multiple vendors and developed by Microsoft in cooperation with 3Com Corporation. It was designed to succeed 3Com's 3+Share network server software which ran atop a he ...

, but both failed badly. IBM similarly had limited success in this area. From 1988 to 1992, Novell's revenues rose almost three-fold, to $933 million a year, with about half of Novell's sales coming from North America and half from overseas. Earnings also rose to $249 million a year. From 1986 to 1991, Novell's stock price climbed twelve-fold. 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 and Novell multi-protocol router. However, Novell was also diversifying, moving away from its smaller users to target large corporations and

wide area network A wide area network (WAN) is a telecommunications network that extends over a large geographic area. Wide area networks are often established with leased telecommunication circuits. Businesses, as well as schools and government entities, u ...

s. A marketing and development alliance with IBM announced in 1991 was part of this initiative. The company did later attempt 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.

Corporate ethos and "coopetition"

By early 1985, Novell was rapidly expanding, but many people were still unaware of either it or the role that local area networks could play, and consequently Noorda referred to Novell as "the most misunderstood company in the world." Nonetheless, in 1986 '' The Salt Lake Tribune'' was hailing Novell as another Utah success story in technology, likely to follow in the footsteps of

Evans & Sutherland Evans & Sutherland is a pioneering American computer firm in the computer graphics field. Its current products are used in digital projection environments like planetariums. Its simulation business, which it sold to Rockwell Collins, sold product ...

and

Iomega Iomega (later LenovoEMC) produced external, portable, and networked data storage products. Established in the 1980s in Roy, Utah, United States, Iomega sold more than 410 million digital storage drives and disks, including the Zip drive floppy ...

. Novell was quickly outgrowing its original site in Orem, with some employees forced to work in trailers. A new, much larger site for the company was found in nearby Provo, Utah and construction was begun; by late 1986, employees were moving into the first building there while work on a second building was already underway. Eventually between 1986 and 1993 six buildings would be constructed for Novell's use there. Under Noorda, Novell embraced the notion of "

coopetition Coopetition or co-opetition (sometimes spelled "coopertition" or "co-opertition") is a neologism coined to describe cooperative competition. Coopetition is a portmanteau of cooperation and competition. Basic principles of co-opetitive structures ...

", or cooperative competition. The central idea was that whatever was good for networking in general would be good for Novell and took the form of encouraging the growth of an ecosystem composed of hundreds of suppliers of hardware and software networking products, even if some of those suppliers had products that competed with Novell's.

, who had been an early competitor of Novell's, sold more instances of their

networking cards for use in conjunction with NetWare than they did for use with their own 3+Share network operating systems, and a similar situation existed for IBM and their

Token Ring Token Ring network IBM hermaphroditic connector with locking clip. Screen contacts are prominently visible, gold-plated signal contacts less so. Token Ring is a computer networking technology used to build local area networks. It was introduc ...

cards. It was due to this kind of industry vision that Noorda would become known as the "Father of Network Computing". From the first years of the new Novell's success, Noorda was credited in the press with forging that path. The company reflected aspects of Noorda's personal background, such as his Mormon religion, which brought about what was termed "the Mormon work ethic" at Novell. As one account later put it, Novell was "reputedly staffed with lots of hard-selling but soft-drinking Mormons." Noorda himself was famous for his frugal ways and for working from a plain, small office. On the other hand, Novell was not without internal political strife and drama, perhaps best exemplified by the unexplained disappearance from the company during 1989 of Craig Burton and Judith Clarke, whom by this time were senior executives (and whom many credited for much of Novell's past success). Burton had been seen as Noorda's most likely successor until the two had a falling out with the chief executive. In April 1990, Novell and

Lotus Development Corporation Lotus Software (called Lotus Development Corporation before its acquisition by IBM) was an American software company based in Massachusetts; it was "offloaded" to India's HCL Technologies in 2018. Lotus is most commonly known for the Lotus 1-2- ...

announced merger of equals based on a $1.5-billion

stock swap In corporate finance a stock swap is the exchange of one equity-based asset for another, where, during the merger or acquisition, the swap provides an opportunity to pay with stock rather than with cash; see . Overview The acquiring company ...

that would have been the largest deal in the software industry to that time. But it collapsed the following month: when Lotus head

Jim Manzi Jim Manzi (born 1951) is the former chairman, president and CEO of Lotus Development Corporation and is currently a private investor in various technology start-up ventures. Early career Manzi received his B.A. in Classics from Colgate University ...

refused to give Novell an equal number of seats on the new board, Noorda pulled out shortly before the deal would have been completed. At its high point around 1993, NetWare had a roughly two-thirds share of the market for network operating systems; one analysis put the figure at 63 percent. There were over half a million NetWare-based networks installed worldwide and some 55 million NetWare users on those networks. And networking itself was the fastest-growing segment of the computer market, increasing by 30 percent a year and reaching a $10 billion figure by 1993. Novell was the second largest maker of software for personal computers, trailing only Microsoft. Novell's employee base, which had been around 15 when Noorda joined, had risen to 4,335 by the end of 1993. Besides Utah, Novell continued to grow in San Jose, where many of the sales, marketing, product management, and executive functions were located.

Sales and channel practices

Equally important as technological factors to NetWare's growth was that Novell did not try to hire a large sales force to do direct sales of the product, but instead sold it through a broad channel of some 13,000

value-added reseller A value-added reseller (VAR) is a company that adds features or services to an existing product, then resells it (usually to end-users) as an integrated product or complete "turn-key" solution. This practice occurs commonly in the electronics or IT ...

s. Such resellers provided network education, installation, and subsequent maintenance, and included

CompUSA CompUSA was a retailer and reseller of personal computers, consumer electronics, technology products and computer services. Starting with one brick-and-mortar store in 1986 under the name Soft Warehouse, by the 1990s CompUSA had grown into a nati ...

and Egghead Software for very small businesses all the way up to sophisticated systems integrators like

Andersen Consulting Accenture plc is an Irish-American professional services company based in Dublin, specializing in information technology (IT) services and consulting. A ''Fortune'' Global 500 company, it reported revenues of $61.6 billion in 2022. Accen ...

and

Electronic Data Systems Electronic all cash BSN acc: 1311729000110205 Data Systems (EDS) was an American multinational information technology equipment and services company headquartered in Plano, Texas which was founded in 1962 by Ross Perot. The company was a subs ...

for enterprise-level projects. In this way Novell constructed a local area network franchise in literal terms, as Novell Authorized Education Centers were set up on a

franchising Franchising is based on a marketing concept which can be adopted by an organization as a strategy for business expansion. Where implemented, a franchisor licenses some or all of its know-how, procedures, intellectual property, use of its busine ...

basis. Credentialization programs were in place, such that becoming a

Certified NetWare Engineer Certification is the provision by an independent body of written assurance (a certificate) that the product, service or system in question meets specific requirements. It is the formal attestation or confirmation of certain characteristics of a ...

was an important step, one that could be furthered with levels such as Master Certified NetWare Engineer. As one industry analyst said, "They've done a wonderful job of farming distribution out. They train people who go out and train other people, and every time somebody gets trained, they get another Netware bigot, and make another dollar. They are getting paid to have people go out and be evangelists." The partnering approach also worked well in overseas markets, such as in Japan where Novell set up a subsidiary that major Japanese electronics firms invested in, or in South America and Eastern Europe where Novell set up authorized distributors. Under Ray Noorda's leadership, Novell provided upgrades to resellers and customers in the same packaging as a newly purchased copy of NetWare, but at one third the cost, which created a

gray market A grey market or dark market (sometimes confused with the similar term " parallel market") is the trade of a commodity through distribution channels that are not authorized by the original manufacturer or trade mark proprietor. Grey market pr ...

that allowed NetWare resellers to sell upgrades as newly purchased NetWare versions at full price periodically, which Novell intentionally did not track. Noorda commented to several analysts that he devised this strategy to allow front line resellers to "punch through" the distributors like Tech Data and Ingram and acquire NetWare versions at a discounted rate, as Novell "looked the other way"; this helped fund the salaries of Novell Field Support Technicians, who for the most part were employees who worked for the front line resellers as Novell CNE (Certified NetWare Engineers). Noorda commented that this strategy was one he learned as an executive at

when competing against imported home appliances: allow the resellers to "make more money off your product than someone else's".

Taking on Microsoft

Motivations

Unusually for the CEO of a high-tech, emerging computer company, Noorda was nearing 70 years of age by the early 1990s. Furthermore, he was known for alienating high-level executives who might someday be in position to run the company. Stock market analysts were expressing concern that Noorda, whose personality was the basis for much of the company's culture, had no succession plan in place. At the same time, Novell faced a looming challenge from Microsoft's upcoming

operating system, which, after a huge investment of resources from Microsoft, featured bundled networking and more advanced OS capabilities and looked to be that company's first offering that could seriously challenge Novell's local area networking franchise. Under Noorda, Novell made a series of acquisitions interpreted by many to be a direct challenge to Microsoft. Noorda was motivated in part by a realization that NetWare's technology was not suitable as the basis for a full-fledged operating system and application platform. There was also enmity between the two companies and the two CEOs, stemming in part from merger talks between Noorda and Microsoft head

Bill Gates William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American business magnate and philanthropist. He is a co-founder of Microsoft, along with his late childhood friend Paul Allen. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions ...

that had begun in 1989 and been on-and-off for the next couple of years before breaking down for good. Subsequently, Novell had played a role in keeping the Federal Trade Commission investigation into Microsoft going. Between 1991 and 1994, the Noorda-led Novell made this series of major acquisitions: Digital Research Inc., producer of

DR-DOS DR-DOS (written as DR DOS, without a hyphen, in versions up to and including 6.0) is a disk operating system for IBM PC compatibles. Upon its introduction in 1988, it was the first DOS attempting to be compatible with IBM PC DOS and MS-DO ...

, to compete with Microsoft's

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few oper ...

;

, holder of

Unix operating system Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ...

technology, to improve Novell's technology base versus Windows NT; Serius Corp., maker of an advanced application development tool; and WordPerfect Corporation and

from Borland to provide personal productivity and group collaboration products. In all, Noorda acquired ten companies within a four-year span. By September 1993, ''

Business Week ''Bloomberg Businessweek'', previously known as ''BusinessWeek'', is an American weekly business magazine published fifty times a year. Since 2009, the magazine is owned by New York City-based Bloomberg L.P. The magazine debuted in New York City ...

'' was writing, "Of the many rivalries in the personal-computer industry, for sheer nastiness it's hard to beat the one between Microsoft Corp. and Novell Inc." In November 1993, Noorda confirmed published reports that he had been suffering from some memory lapses and announced that he would be stepping down from the CEO position once a successor was found. In April 1994, former HP executive

Robert Frankenberg Robert J. Frankenberg (born 1947) is an American computer engineer and business executive who served as chairman, president and chief executive officer of Novell, Inc. from 1994 to 1996. Life and career Frankenberg spent much of his career at Hew ...

was announced as the new CEO of Novell, with Noorda remaining as chairman of the board of directors. By then the USL acquisition was already showing difficulties, while the WordPerfect acquisition was questioned even more. Nonetheless, Frankenberg said he was enthusiastic about it: "For me, it was a pivotal item in my decision to join Novell because it makes possible an entirely new category of networked applications which no one else can provide." When the WordPerfect and Quattro Pro acquisitions closed in June 1994, it was the largest such deal in the software industry to that time; it made Novell the third-largest software company in the world, trailing only Microsoft and

Computer Associates CA Technologies, formerly known as CA, Inc. and Computer Associates International, Inc., is an American multinational corporation headquartered in New York City. It is primarily known for its business-to-business (B2B) software with a product p ...

. Noorda retired from the chairman position and left Novell completely in November 1994, although he was still the largest shareholder of the company. At that point in time, Frankenberg became chairman as well.

Desktop OS and embedded systems: DOS, NEST, and Corsair

Novell acquired

for in June 1991. The move was seen as a way for Novell to supply software for server-focused PCs in alternative to Microsoft. NetWare used

DR DOS DR-DOS (written as DR DOS, without a hyphen, in versions up to and including 6.0) is a disk operating system for IBM PC compatibles. Upon its introduction in 1988, it was the first DOS attempting to be compatible with IBM PC DOS and MS-DO ...

as a boot loader and maintenance platform, and Novell intended to extend its desktop presence by integrating networking into DR DOS and providing an alternative to Microsoft's Windows. At first, the idea was to provide a graphical environment based on Digital Research's

GEM A gemstone (also called a fine gem, jewel, precious stone, or semiprecious stone) is a piece of mineral crystal which, in cut and polished form, is used to make jewelry or other adornments. However, certain rocks (such as lapis lazuli, opal, a ...

, but Novell's legal department rejected this due to apprehension of a possible legal response from Apple, so the company went directly to Apple starting

Star Trek ''Star Trek'' is an American science fiction media franchise created by Gene Roddenberry, which began with the eponymous 1960s television series and quickly became a worldwide pop-culture phenomenon. The franchise has expanded into vario ...

in February 1992, a project to run an x86-port of their

Mac OS Two major famlies of Mac operating systems were developed by Apple Inc. In 1984, Apple debuted the operating system that is now known as the "Classic" Mac OS with its release of the original Macintosh System Software. The system, rebranded " ...

on top of a multitasking DR DOS. Novell had already abandoned Digital Research's

Multiuser DOS Multiuser DOS is a real-time multi-user multi-tasking operating system for IBM PC-compatible microcomputers. An evolution of the older Concurrent CP/M-86, Concurrent DOS and Concurrent DOS 386 operating systems, it was originally developed by ...

in 1992. The three former Master

Value Added Reseller A value-added reseller (VAR) is a company that adds features or services to an existing product, then resells it (usually to end-users) as an integrated product or complete " turn-key" solution. This practice occurs commonly in the electronics or IT ...

s (VARs) DataPac Australasia,

Concurrent Controls Multiuser DOS is a real-time multi-user multi-tasking operating system for IBM PC-compatible microcomputers. An evolution of the older Concurrent CP/M-86, Concurrent DOS and Concurrent DOS 386 operating systems, it was originally developed b ...

and

Intelligent Micro Software Multiuser DOS is a real-time multi-user multi-tasking operating system for IBM PC-compatible microcomputers. An evolution of the older Concurrent CP/M-86, Concurrent DOS and Concurrent DOS 386 operating systems, it was originally developed b ...

could license the source code to take over and continue independent development of their derivations in 1994. Digital Research's

FlexOS FlexOS is a discontinued modular real-time multiuser multitasking operating system (RTOS) designed for computer-integrated manufacturing, laboratory, retail and financial markets. Developed by Digital Research's Flexible Automation Business U ...

had been licensed to IBM for their 4690 OS in 1993 and was also utilized for the in-house development of Novell's Embedded Systems Technology (NEST), but was sold off to Integrated Systems, Inc. (ISI) for in July 1994. The deal comprised a direct payment of half this sum as well as shares representing 2% of the company. NEST however held importance for Frankenberg's vision of "pervasive computing", wherein Novell software would be connecting a billion nodes by 2000. Many of those nodes would be common, everyday devices running NEST, linked by SuperNOS, Novell Directory Services, and other management services components. Novell also abandoned their

Corsair A corsair is a privateer or pirate, especially: * Barbary corsair, Ottoman and Berber pirates and privateers operating from North Africa * French corsairs, privateers operating on behalf of the French crown Corsair may also refer to: Arts an ...

desktop project and in late 1994 transferred some components to

Caldera A caldera ( ) is a large cauldron-like hollow that forms shortly after the emptying of a magma chamber in a volcano eruption. When large volumes of magma are erupted over a short time, structural support for the rock above the magma chamber ...

, a startup funded by Noorda's

Canopy Group The Canopy Group is an American investment and property management firm founded by Ray Noorda in 1995 through the Noorda Family Trust. It is headquartered in Lindon, Utah. At various times it has consisted of, or been known as, Canopy Technolo ...

. The Canopy Group was a technology investment firm and real estate company that Noorda focused on after his departure from Novell.

Novell DOS DR-DOS (written as DR DOS, without a hyphen, in versions up to and including 6.0) is a disk operating system for IBM PC compatibles. Upon its introduction in 1988, it was the first DOS attempting to be compatible with IBM PC DOS and MS-DO ...

(and all former

versions including

StarTrek ''Star Trek'' is an American science fiction media franchise created by Gene Roddenberry, which began with the eponymous 1960s television series and quickly became a worldwide pop-culture phenomenon. The franchise has expanded into variou ...

PalmDOS DR-DOS (written as DR DOS, without a hyphen, in versions up to and including 6.0) is a disk operating system for IBM PC compatibles. Upon its introduction in 1988, it was the first DOS attempting to be compatible with IBM PC DOS and MS-D ...

and DOS Plus) as well as other remaining Digital Research assets (like

and the CP/M- and

MP/M MP/M (Multi-Programming Monitor Control Program) is a discontinued multi-user version of the CP/M operating system, created by Digital Research developer Tom Rolander in 1979. It allowed multiple users to connect to a single computer, each u ...

-based operating systems, programming languages, tools and technologies) were sold to

on 23 July 1996.

Personal NetWare NetWare Lite and Personal NetWare are a series of discontinued peer-to-peer local area networks developed by Novell for DOS- and Windows-based personal computers aimed at personal users and small businesses in the 1990s. NetWare Lite In 1991, ...

had been abandoned at Novell in 1995 but was licensed to Caldera in binary form only. The deal consisted of a direct payment of US$400,000 as well as percentual royalties for any revenues derived from those assets to Novell. In January 1997, Novell's NEST initiative was abandoned as well.

Server OS: UnixWare and SuperNOS

On the server side, after their initial October 1991 Univel initiative, Novell announced in December 1992 that it was buying

(USL) from

AT&T Corporation AT&T Corporation, originally the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, is the subsidiary of AT&T Inc. that provides voice, video, data, and Internet telecommunications and professional services to businesses, consumers, and government agen ...

. The measure was intended to help Novell compete against Microsoft, which was on the verge of including networking as a built-in feature of

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ...

in conjunction with the

server. Unix did present some attractive characteristics to the market, such as its abilities as an application server and the lack of vendor lock-in, but there were still considerable obstacles to be overcome in using it in this context. The deal closed in June 1993, with Novell acquiring rights to the

Unix SVR4 Unix System V (pronounced: "System Five") is one of the first commercial versions of the Unix operating system. It was originally developed by AT&T and first released in 1983. Four major versions of System V were released, numbered 1, 2, 3, an ...

source base and the UnixWare operating system product. Novell then turned the Unix brand name and specification over to the industry consortium

X/Open X/Open group (also known as the Open Group for Unix Systems and incorporated in 1987 as X/Open Company, Ltd.) was a consortium founded by several European UNIX systems manufacturers in 1984 to identify and promote open standards in the field of in ...

. Novell created the Unix Systems Group to contain the new business, which also absorbed the Univel venture. Most of the core USL employees remained in USL's

Summit, New Jersey Summit is a city in Union County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey. The city is located on a ridge in northern- central New Jersey, within the Raritan Valley and Rahway Valley regions in the New York metropolitan area. At the 2010 United Stat ...

facility, which was later relocated to

Florham Park, New Jersey Florham Park is a borough in Morris County, New Jersey, United States. As of the 2010 United States census, the borough's population was 11,696, The USL Europe office in London was moved into Novell's facility in Bracknell, Berkshire. Novell's time with Unix technology saw the release of UnixWare 1.1 in January 1994, in both personal and advanced server editions and with the bundled inclusion of TCP/IP, a NetWare Unix Client, and

Merge Merge, merging, or merger may refer to: Concepts * Merge (traffic), the reduction of the number of lanes on a road * Merge (linguistics), a basic syntactic operation in generative syntax in the Minimalist Program * Merger (politics), the com ...

functionality for running DOS and Windows 3.1 applications. This was followed in early 1995 by the release of UnixWare 2.0, which included full support for multiple processors as well as improved installation and ease-of-use and additional NetWare integration features. In September 1994 Novell began publicly describing its plans to develop a "SuperNOS", a

microkernel In computer science, a microkernel (often abbreviated as μ-kernel) is the near-minimum amount of software that can provide the mechanisms needed to implement an operating system (OS). These mechanisms include low-level address space management, ...

-based network operating system based on NetWare 4.1 and UnixWare 2.0. The aim was to include UnixWare technology inside NetWare, provide the strengths of both NetWare's network services and UnixWare's application services, be able to run existing NetWare Loadable Modules (NLMs) and Unix executables, and accordingly create a network operating system that could successfully compete with Microsoft's

. SuperNOS would also operate across distributed servers with unified presentation. Finally, SuperNOS would take advantage of

object-oriented programming Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of " objects", which can contain data and code. The data is in the form of fields (often known as attributes or ''properties''), and the code is in the form of ...

paradigms as a way of fostering easier application development. In terms of operating system architecture, SuperNOS would run NLMs in

kernel space A modern computer operating system usually segregates virtual memory into user space and kernel space. Primarily, this separation serves to provide memory protection and hardware protection from malicious or errant software behaviour. Kerne ...

, for maximum throughput, while it would run Spec 1170-based Unix applications in

user space A modern computer operating system usually segregates virtual memory into user space and kernel space. Primarily, this separation serves to provide memory protection and hardware protection from malicious or errant software behaviour. Kerne ...

. For clustering, SuperNOS would embrace elements of a NetWare distributed parallel processing proposal and a UnixWare single system image initiative. SuperNOS was based on work that had already started at USL and at the French company

Chorus Systèmes SA Chorus Systèmes SA was a French software company that existed from 1986 to 1997, that was created to commercialise research work done at the Institut national de recherche en informatique et en automatique (INRIA). Its primary product was the ...

for cooperative work on the

Chorus Chorus may refer to: Music * Chorus (song) or refrain, line or lines that are repeated in music or in verse * Chorus effect, the perception of similar sounds from multiple sources as a single, richer sound * Chorus form, song in which all verse ...

microkernel technology in the context of supporting SVR4 on a microkernel. This microkernel was arguably superior for this purpose than the more well-known

Mach Mach may refer to Mach number, the speed of sound in local conditions. It may also refer to: Computing * Mach (kernel), an operating systems kernel technology * ATI Mach, a 2D GPU chip by ATI * GNU Mach, the microkernel upon which GNU Hurd is bas ...

one, because it gave more flexibility at the kernel mode–user mode boundary. By mid-1995 the SuperNOS project was reportedly about one-third completed, with 1997 being seen as a customer release date for it. There were over 60 engineers assigned to it, mostly from the UnixWare and Chorus side. The project endured prolonged internal architectural debates and resistance from the NetWare side due to a reluctance to believe that Unix was really superior to NetWare in key aspects. In one instance, Novell's Drew Major and Chorus Systèmes' Michel Gien disagreed in the trade press about whether the existent Chorus technology was up to the task. The long-running disputes reflected cultural and political divisions between the San Jose (with Rekhi being a Unix supporter before leaving altogether) and Utah camps within Novell. In any case the 1997 date was seen by industry observers as being too late to forestall the market-share gains that Windows NT was already making. The acquisition of USL never really worked out for Novell. During the company's fiscal years of 1993, 1994, and 1995, Novell's Unix Systems Group represented only about 5 percent of the company's revenue on an ongoing basis. Very few Certified NetWare Engineers ever reached a similar level of involvement with UnixWare. Another aim, that Novell might be able to coalesce Unix vendor versions and thus resolve the

Unix wars The Unix wars were struggles between vendors to set a standard for the Unix operating system in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Origins Although AT&T Corporation created Unix, by the 1980s, the University of California, Berkeley Computer Syste ...

, was not achieved either. By late summer 1995 the company was looking for a way out of the Unix business. In September 1995, Novell announced the sale of UnixWare to the

Santa Cruz Operation The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. (usually known as SCO, pronounced either as individual letters or as a word) was an American software company, based in Santa Cruz, California, that was best known for selling three Unix operating system variants ...

(SCO), coincident with a licensing arrangement with

Hewlett Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. HP developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components ...

. As part of the deal, SCO said that it would merge the SVR4.2-based UnixWare with its existing SVR3.2-based OpenServer operating system and add NetWare services to the new merged product, code-named "Gemini". Gemini would then be sold through SCO's well-known channel and reseller operation. As for HP, they said they would add NetWare code and NetWare Directory Services to their own version of Unix,

HP-UX HP-UX (from "Hewlett Packard Unix") is Hewlett Packard Enterprise's proprietary implementation of the Unix operating system, based on Unix System V (initially System III) and first released in 1984. Current versions support HPE Integrit ...

, in combination with

Distributed Computing Environment In computing, the Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) software system was developed in the early 1990s from the work of the Open Software Foundation (OSF), a consortium (founded in 1988) that included Apollo Computer (part of Hewlett-Packard ...

elements, which would then be sold by HP's strong direct-sales force. Finally, SCO and HP said that they would co-develop a next-generation, 64-bit version of Unix. Some 400 Novell software engineers had been working on UnixWare; most of them were offered jobs with either SCO or HP, while a few remained with Novell. While some lip service was paid to the notion that SuperNOS would go on after the three-way deal, in fact, it was abandoned and never achieved fruition in that form. (A decade later, Novell's Open Enterprise Server product would realize some aspects of a hybrid NetWare/Unix-like system, this time based around

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server SUSE Linux Enterprise (often abbreviated to SLE) is a Linux-based operating system developed by SUSE. It is available in two editions, suffixed with Server (SLES) for servers and mainframes, and Desktop (SLED) for workstations and desktop compu ...

rather than UnixWare.) By December, there were already some indications that the three-way arrangement was not working out as had been initially advertised. The computer industry was not sure that SCO could handle being the primary Unix shepherd. The HP project, code-named "White Box", focused on making a hybrid environment out of the SRV4.2-based Gemini and the SVR3.2-based HP-UX, but that effort faced major technical hurdles. The terms of the deal between Novell and SCO, which closed in December 1995, were uncertain enough that an amendment had to be signed in October 1996, and even that was not clear enough to preclude an extended battle between the two companies during the SCO-Linux disputes of the 2000s.

Tools: AppWare

In June 1993, Novell purchased Serius Corp., a firm that made a graphical programming language that could construct applications by connecting together icons representing objects in the program and their commands. Novell also purchased Software Transformations Inc., who made a cross-platform object code library that could be used to port conventional programs to a number of platforms. The disparate technologies of the two products were combined and renamed to AppWare, with the Serius product being called AppWare Visual AppBuilder, the objects it used AppWare Loadable Modules, and the Software Transformations library AppWare Foundation. The organization working on this was called the AppWare Systems Group. The founder of Serius, Joe Firmage, became vice president of strategy for Novell's Network Systems Group. AppWare was one of the three main strategic focuses of Novell during this period, along with NetWare and UnixWare. These three prongs were intended to satisfy the growing need for scalable, distributed computing at the enterprise level of applications such as general ledger systems or reservation systems; as Novell executive Jim Tolonen outlined: " etWarebeing the underlying infrastructure over which those mission critical transactions will be moved, Unix einga place on which the applications can run, and AppWare as tools that will help programmers write that class of application in a distributed environment." It was not long before the AppWare plans started to fall apart. In September 1994 Novell announced they would be selling the Appware Foundation product to a third party. Novell did state that development of Visual AppBuilder would continue, and a Unix port would be following (that did not materialize). Novell also continued to release a number of new Appware Loadable Modules. But overall, as ''

Byte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit ...

'' magazine wrote in early 1995 about the three-pronged strategy, these "unrelated ... families of products formed an unsteady tripod". Joe Firmage became disillusioned with Novell in mid-1995, following its decision to sell UnixWare and abandon the SuperNOS project, and left Novell later that year. Novell then publicly stated in November 1995 that it was looking for a buyer for AppWare. In March 1996, it was announced (based on an agreement that had been signed the month before) that Novell had sold all rights to the AppWare technology to a new company called Network Multimedia Inc., which was headed by Ed Firmage, who had been director of AppWare marketing at Novell.

Applications: WordPerfect, Quattro Pro, and GroupWise

In March 1994, Novell announced that it was acquiring WordPerfect Corporation, whose primary product was the WordPerfect word processor, as well as acquiring the

spreadsheet from Borland. Novell executives said that goal of the acquisitions was to build a suite of products that could be connected across the network via NetWare and UnixWare. Key to this was the idea of " groupware" for collaboration. Noorda said, "The era of stand-alone personal computing is evolving into group collaboration that connects individuals, groups and companies. Novell's objective is to accelerate this market transition." The geographical proximity, as well as the cultural similarity, between the two companies also made the acquisition seem like a good idea. The merger, and acquisition from Borland, both closed on June 24, 1994 (with the public announcement being made on June 27). Work on the acquired products was organized into the company's Application Group. Both before and after the acquisition, there were substantial layoffs of WordPerfect staff; at the peak right after the acquisition closed, Novell's employee count was around 10,150. Novell's corporate address was shifted to WordPerfect's Orem location for a while. The market for standalone word processors and spreadsheets was expanding to that of office suites, where

Microsoft Office Microsoft Office, or simply Office, is the former name of a family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. It was first announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at COMDEX in Las Vegas. Initially a ma ...

had an early lead in marketshare. To compete, Novell PerfectOffice 3.0 was released in December 1994. It was based upon an earlier effort, Borland Office 2.0 for Windows, but had superior look-and-feel and integration. It contained not just WordPerfect and Quattro Pro but also other products, most of which had originated at WordPerfect Corporation, including

Presentations A presentation conveys information from a speaker to an audience. Presentations are typically demonstrations, introduction, lecture, or speech meant to inform, persuade, inspire, motivate, build goodwill, or present a new idea/product. Presenta ...

for slides preparation, a

personal information manager A personal information manager (often referred to as a PIM tool or, more simply, a PIM) is a type of application software that functions as a personal organizer. The acronym PIM is now, more commonly, used in reference to personal information manag ...

called InfoCentral, and the

collaboration product. There was also a professional edition that included AppWare as well as Borland's

Paradox A paradox is a logically self-contradictory statement or a statement that runs contrary to one's expectation. It is a statement that, despite apparently valid reasoning from true premises, leads to a seemingly self-contradictory or a logically u ...

database. PerfectOffice surpassed in sales one early player in the space,

Lotus SmartSuite Lotus may refer to: Plants *Lotus (plant), various botanical taxa commonly known as lotus, particularly: ** ''Lotus'' (genus), a genus of terrestrial plants in the family Fabaceae **Lotus flower, a symbolically important aquatic Asian plant also ...

, and GroupWise found three times the number of users as

Lotus Notes HCL Notes (formerly IBM Notes and Lotus Notes; see Branding below) and HCL Domino (formerly IBM Domino and Lotus Domino) are the client and server, respectively, of a collaborative client-server software platform formerly sold by IBM, now by HCL ...

. The application products also had the advantage of what Novell's senior vice president for corporate marketing, Christine Hughes, called " n'in your face' presence for the user. Otherwise no one is aware it's Novell providing that connection." But industry analyst reaction was that while PerfectOffice 3.0 was a good product, it was arriving too late to head off Microsoft Office's momentum. WordPerfect also played in a role in larger architectural ambitions within Novell, as WordPerfect incorporated OpenDoc and

IBM System Object Model In computing, the System Object Model (SOM) is an object-oriented shared library system developed by IBM. DSOM, a distributed version based on CORBA, allowed objects on different computers to communicate. SOM defines an interface between pro ...

technology. These became part of the basis for Novell's larger

distributed object In distributed computing, distributed objects are objects (in the sense of object-oriented programming) that are distributed across different address spaces, either in different processes on the same computer, or even in multiple computers connec ...

strategy. That strategy was tied to having supporting multiple

object request broker In distributed computing, an object request broker (ORB) is a middleware which allows program calls to be made from one computer to another via a computer network, providing location transparency through remote procedure calls. ORBs promote interop ...

s that could tie in NetWare Loadable Modules, the AppWare Bus, UnixWare, and eventually SuperNOS itself. WordPerfect itself was also supposedly using the AppWare foundation layer in its work. Other parts of WordPerfect were deemed less strategic, and the Main Street line of multimedia products for children was dropped. During its time in Novell, WordPerfect still sold reasonably well as standalone software, garnering almost half of all such word processor sales; but the market was increasingly dominated by the idea of office suites, and there Microsoft Office was supreme, with 86 percent of the market compared to only 5 percent for Novell's PerfectOffice. As such, the WordPerfect and Quattro Pro part of the company dragged down Novell's earnings and stock price. Novell stated in November 1995 that it was putting its personal productivity product line up for sale. Then in January 1996 it announced that the sale of these products, primarily WordPerfect and Quattro Pro, would be made to

Corel Cascade Parent Limited, doing business as Alludo (pronounced like "all you do"), is a Canadian software company headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario, specializing in graphics processing. Formerly called the Corel Corporation ( ; from the abbreviation ...

for $186 million, a large loss from the $855 million that it had originally paid to acquire WordPerfect. Novell did hold onto a few pieces that it had acquired from WordPerfect, most importantly the

collaboration product. By some estimates Novell had lost $750 million on the WordPerfect experience. The sale to Corel was completed in March 1996.

Results

Overall, none of these moves had worked out well – for instance, Novell suffered a net loss of $35 million for its 1993 fiscal year, largely due to write-offs for the acquisitions, and under criticism from Wall Street, Novell's stock price underwent a prolonged downturn – and many of the companies and products that had been purchased were subsequently sold off. Novell did have its two largest revenue years in 1994 and 1995, generating $1.998 billion and $2.041 billion in sales respectively. But the Noorda-era acquisitions were short-lived. The business press was negative on the whole attempt: ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'' referred to "acquisitions Mr. Noorda had made in his latter years in a disastrous attempt to compete head-on with Microsoft", while the ''

San Francisco Chronicle The ''San Francisco Chronicle'' is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California. It was founded in 1865 as ''The Daily Dramatic Chronicle'' by teenage brothers Charles de Young and Michael H. de Young. The pap ...

'' talked of "a disastrous acquisition spree undertaken by previous CEO Ray Noorda in an effort to compete with Microsoft." By the year 2000, ''

The Age ''The Age'' is a daily newspaper in Melbourne, Australia, that has been published since 1854. Owned and published by Nine Entertainment, ''The Age'' primarily serves Victoria, but copies also sell in Tasmania, the Australian Capital Territo ...

'' would say that "The WordPerfect acquisition was the biggest disaster in software history". Novell continued to have mediocre-at-best financial results during 1995 and 1996. In August 1996, Frankenberg himself departed Novell in what was variously portrayed as a mutual decision, or as a resignation under pressure from the company's board of directors. His years there had been marked by having to disassemble Noorda's acquisitions but also by failing to fully recognize the growing importance of the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a ''internetworking, network of networks'' that consists ...

for networking applications.

Loss of networking dominance

NDS and other new products

Novell's core products did not stay idle during this challenging-of-Microsoft time, as work in the company's NetWare Systems Group continued. One of Novell's major innovations was Novell Directory Services (NDS), later known as eDirectory. It was based on the CCITT X.500 standard and supported the notion of a distributed directory. Introduced with NetWare 4.0 in 1993, NDS replaced the old Bindery server and user management technology employed by NetWare 3.x and earlier. Directory services were seen as a crucial strategic key to staying relevant in the networking marketplace. It was also one where Novell had a lead over Microsoft, as the latter's

Active Directory Active Directory (AD) is a directory service developed by Microsoft for Windows domain networks. It is included in most Windows Server operating systems as a set of processes and services. Initially, Active Directory was used only for centr ...

was not yet out. Then with UnixWare gone, Novell focused on major upgrades to its core NetWare-based network operating system. The initial release of NetWare 4 came with compatibility problems for some NetWare 3 users, and large enterprises were faced with an upgrade-all-or-upgrade-none decision. However some 40 million users declined to move to NetWare 4, with the result that Novell lost large amounts of possible revenue in upgrades. Although the NetWare 4.1 release of 1995 sought to remedy some of these issues, the lag had caused many Novell customers to take a serious look at Windows NT. And Windows NT was proving better as a platform for application and database services than NetWare. Furthermore, Microsoft was having success with its no-extra-charge bundling of Microsoft's IIS web server on NT, while Novell's presence in the Internet market was severely lacking. Still, as of 1996, by one estimate there were three million networks, and tens of millions of PCs, still using NetWare. 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. Support for the new

Java programming language Java is a high-level, class-based, object-oriented programming language that is designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible. It is a general-purpose programming language intended to let programmers ''write once, run an ...

also began to be added to NetWare. An Internet-focused product released during 1996 was called Intranetware. These moves were accelerated when

Eric Schmidt Eric Emerson Schmidt (born April 27, 1955) is an American businessman and software engineer known for being the CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011, executive chairman of Google from 2011 to 2015, executive chairman of Alphabet Inc. from 2015 to 2 ...

became CEO in April 1997, the first in the post since Frankenberg's departure; Christopher Stone was brought in as senior vice president of strategy and corporate development, reporting to Schmidt. Many observers were surprised that Schmidt would leave his chief technical officer position at

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, ...

, which at the time was doing very well, to go to Novell, which was viewed as a company in real trouble. The new CEO said, "Novell has been defocused by a series of acquisitions and forays that didn't work out. In this collaborative world, it's more important to do a few things well and just go for them like you've never seen." One result of these shifts was BorderManager, released in August 1997, which supplied

proxy server In computer networking, a proxy server is a server application that acts as an intermediary between a client requesting a resource and the server providing that resource. Instead of connecting directly to a server that can fulfill a requ ...

firewall Firewall may refer to: * Firewall (computing), a technological barrier designed to prevent unauthorized or unwanted communications between computer networks or hosts * Firewall (construction), a barrier inside a building, designed to limit the spre ...

, and other services for connecting NetWare networks to the Internet. Another was a new version of NDS, that was capable of running with Windows NT, not just NetWare. And still another was NetWare 5.0, released in October 1998, with hopes for it accelerating Novell's improved fortunes under Schmidt. NetWare 5.0 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 Turbo FAT filesystem used by earlier versions of NetWare. While NetWare 5.0 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 Turbo FAT file system remained a supported option.

Decline of marketshare

Eric Schmidt at the 37th G8 Summit in Deauville 037

The inclusion of networking as a core system component in all mainstream PC operating systems after 1995 led to a steep decline in Novell's market share. Unlike Windows 3.1 and its predecessors,

Windows 95 Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of operating systems. The first operating system in the 9x family, it is the successor to Windows 3.1x, and was released to manufactu ...

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...

, and

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all included network functionality which greatly reduced demand for third-party products in this segment. For instance, one mid-1996 survey of a thousand corporate users, conducted by

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, showed that 90 percent of them owned NetWare but only 20 percent said they had upgraded to the latest NetWare version and less than half of the users thought they would still be using NetWare three years hence. By March 1996, the company's stock price had fallen from a high of $33 a share in 1993 to a new low of under $12. Revenue declined from 1995 on. By 1997, Windows NT was winning 42 percent of new network operating system installations versus 33 percent for NetWare, and it was on the verge of overtaking NetWare even when upgrade sales were included. Overall, NetWare's market share had fallen to 26 percent and had been passed by Windows NT's 36 percent. Unix also had a significant share, and the free software

Linux operating system Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which inc ...

had started to appear and make inroads as well. With revenues in decline, Schmidt took actions to control costs, and some 18 percent of Novell employees were laid off during the first few months of his tenure. In addition he was forced to halt NetWare shipments to resellers because unsold inventory levels were so high. By the end of summer 1997, Schmidt was saying, "I took the job on the presumption that we would not have to do this. If I'd known what shape the company was in, I might not have taken it." While there was some speculation that Novell might relocate much of the company to its San Jose facility, Novell instead recommitted to Provo, building a new headquarters tower that opened in 2000. But Novell's decline and loss of market share accelerated under Schmidt's leadership, with Novell experiencing an across-the-board decline in sales and purchases of NetWare and a drop in share price from /share to /share. Analysts commented that the primary reason for Novell's demise was linked to its channel strategy and mismanagement of channel partners under Schmidt. Schmidt embarked on a channel strategy to undo Noorda's "look the other way" approach and thereby remove the upgrades as whole box products, then directed Novell's general counsel to initiate litigation against a large number of Novell resellers who were routinely selling upgrades as newly purchased NetWare versions. Although this move bolstered Novell's revenue numbers for several quarters, Novell's channels subsequently collapsed with the majority of Novell's resellers dropping NetWare for fear of litigation. By 1999, Novell had lost its dominant market position, and was continually being out-marketed by Microsoft as resellers dropped NetWare, allowing Microsoft to gain access to corporate data centers by bypassing technical staff and selling directly to corporate executives. Most resellers then re-certified their Novell CNE employees— the field support technicians who were Novell's primary contact in the field with direct customers—as Microsoft MCSE technicians, and were encouraged to position NetWare as inferior to

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features such as Group Policy and Microsoft's GUI, which was considered to be 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. By 2000, some large NetWare enterprise customers, such as

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, and the

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were in the process of migrating most or all of their NetWare systems to alternatives. Revenue warnings during the second quarter of 2000 resulted in a 40 percent drop in the company's stock price. In October 2000, Novell released a new product, dubbed "DirXML", which was designed to synchronize data—typically 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, forming the foundation of a core product set within Novell. During Schmidt's tenure during the late 1990s, Novell developed and delivered a series of Internet-centric products that were well-reviewed. But these new products did not sell as well as the company had hoped, in part due to Novell channel issues with training, lead generation, and support. Indeed, there were reports of channel stuffing taking place. So despite its efforts in these other spaces, Novell was increasingly becoming irrelevant within the industry. Of Schmidt's efforts with Novell, News.com wrote, "He had traversed a rocky road as chief executive at Novell, briefly laying a smooth path for a renaissance at the aging network software provider before succumbing to strategy issues that have plagued it for years."

Cambridge Technology Partners

In March 2001, it was announced that Novell was acquiring the consulting company Cambridge Technology Partners (CTP), founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts 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 as part of the deal became CEO of Novell. Chris Stone, who had left in 1999, was rehired as vice chairman to set the course for Novell's strategy into open source and enterprise

. With the acquisition of CTP, which closed in July 2001, Novell moved its headquarters to Massachusetts. As for Schmidt, he departed Novell soon after the CTP announcement and headed for Google, where he became chair of the board (and soon after that, CEO). In July 2002, Novell acquired SilverStream Software, a leader in web services-oriented applications, but a laggard in the marketplace. Renamed to Novell exteNd, the platform comprised XML and web service tools based on Java EE.

Linux

SuSE and Open Enterprise Server

In August 2003, Novell acquired Ximian, a developer of Open-source software, open source Linux applications (Novell Evolution, Evolution, Red Carpet (software), Red Carpet and Mono (software), Mono). This acquisition signaled Novell's plans to move its collective product set onto a Linux kernel. In November 2003, Novell acquired Linux OS developer SuSE, which led to a major shift of power in Linux distributions. IBM also invested to show support of the SuSE acquisition. In mid-2003, Novell released "Novell Enterprise Linux Services" (NNLS), which ported some of the services traditionally associated with NetWare to

(SLES) version 8. NetWare 6.5, released in 2003, would prove to be the last version of that product. In November 2004, Novell released the Linux-based enterprise desktop Novell Linux Desktop 9, 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, Novell Open Enterprise Server (OES), was released in March 2005. OES offers all the services previously hosted by NetWare 6.5, and added the choice of delivering those services using either a NetWare 6.5 or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 kernel. The release was aimed to persuade NetWare customers to move to Linux. In August 2005, Novell created the openSUSE project, based on SUSE Professional. openSUSE can be downloaded freely and is also available as boxed retail product.

Stagnation

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 again left the company, after an apparent control issue with then CEO Jack Messman. 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 offset 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"

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, 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 operating system, real-time version of SLES called "SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time" (SLERT), based on technology from Concurrent Computer Corporation.

Legal actions and reactions

Beginning in 2003, Novell became a key player in the SCO–Linux disputes. The case ''SCO Group, Inc. v. Novell, Inc.'' revolved around the interpretation of the 1995 asset-transfer agreements between Novell and the Santa Cruz Operation, a predecessor company to The SCO Group – when Novell got out of the Unix business as part of abandoning its effort to take on Microsoft on all fronts – and a 1996 amendment that had attempted to clarify that agreement. The SCO Group believed that the transfer included ownership of, and copyrights for, the source code for the Unix operating system (which they in turn claimed Linux had infringed upon). Novell counter-sued, claiming that the asset-transfer agreements did not, in fact, transfer the intellectual property rights SCO sought. The case attracted considerable industry and media attention, with the free and open source software (FOSS) community solidly on the side of Novell. There were a series of court rulings, most of which went in Novell's favor and which sent The SCO Group into bankruptcy. The matter was settled finally in 2010 when a jury trial in Utah ruled that the copyrights belonged to Novell. (Novell made no material use of the Unix ownership once it was ruled theirs, as by then their interests were with SuSE Linux.) In 2004, Novell sued Microsoft, asserting it had engaged in antitrust violations regarding Novell's WordPerfect business in 1994 through 1996. Novell's lawsuit was subsequently dismissed by the United States District Court in July 2012 after it concluded that the claims were without merit. On 2 November 2006, the two companies announced a joint collaboration agreement, including coverage of their respective products for each other's customers. They also promised to work more closely to improve compatibility of software, setting up a joint research facility. Executives of both companies expressed the hope that such cooperation would lead to better compatibility between

and OpenOffice.org and better Platform virtualization, 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." The deal involved upfront payment of from Microsoft to Novell for patent cooperation and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, SLES subscription. Additionally, Microsoft agreed to spend around yearly, over the next 5 years, for marketing and selling a combined SLES/Windows Server offering and related virtualization solutions, while Novell paid at least yearly to Microsoft, in the same period. One of the first results of this partnership was Novell adapting the OpenXML/ODF Translator for use in OpenOffice.org. Microsoft released two public covenants not to sue users of the open source Moonlight (runtime), Moonlight runtime—a workalike for the Microsoft Silverlight rich media platform—for patent infringement. One condition common to each covenant was that no Moonlight implementation be released under the GPLv3 free software license. In contrast to the SCO case, here initial reaction from members of the free and open source software community over the patent protection was mostly critical, with expressions of concern that Novell had "sold out" and doubt that the GNU GPL would allow distribution of code, including the Linux kernel, under this exclusive agreement. In a letter to the FOSS development community on 9 November 2006, Bradley M. Kuhn, CTO of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), described the agreement as "worse than useless". 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). Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, said in November 2006 that changes coming with version 3 of the GPL would preclude such deals. When the final revision of the third version of the GPL license was decided, the deal between Microsoft and Novell was grandfather clause, grandfathered in. A clause within GPLv3 allows companies to distribute GPLv3 software even if they have made such patent partnerships in the past, as long as the partnership deal was made before 28 March 2007 (GPLv3 Section 11 paragraph 7). On 12 November 2006, the Samba (software), Samba team expressed strong disapproval of the announcement and asked Novell to reconsider. The team included 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, and later quit his job at Novell in protest. 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 was considering banning Novell from selling Linux. However, spokesman Eben Moglen later said that he was quoted out of context, and was only noting that GPL version 3 would be designed to block similar deals in the future.

Intelligent workload management

In December 2009, Novell announced its intention to lead the market in intelligent workload management, with products designed to manage diverse workloads in a heterogeneous data center. Seeing this approach as a key to giving customers confidence in the area of cloud computing security, Novell restructured its business around the new initiative. Technologies from Novell's 2008 acquisition of Canadian company PlateSpin were involved. Key to this also was the use of SUSE Studio, an online Linux software creation tool through which users could develop their own Linux distribution, software appliance, or virtual appliance. Hovsepian said, "Cloud computing is a megatrend that matches the company's core competencies. ... We've developed our Suse appliance tool for application vendors [who have brand new applications being written or built for the cloud]. This product allows them to create a virtual appliance. They won't have to rewrite and retest the application once it is in the cloud and it allows firms to host their application on other clouds too." But Novell's approach would also support other cloud environments such as those based around Hyper-V, VMware, and Xen. Partnerships in connection with intelligent workload management were announced with SAP, Citrix Systems, Ingres (database), Ingres, and others. Reaction of industry analysts to the move varied, with some positive and some more mixed. Among the more skeptical was Dan Kusnetzky of ZDNet, who wrote that Novell "clearly hopes that putting its products together in new ways and invoking today's catch phrases and buzz words will appear fresh and new."