Futrue of Novell

[dan]

With the projected layoff of 20-25% of Novell employees, were do you think Novell is headed? There is also discussion of selling off Zenworks (which is one of their most promising programs). Does this mean MCSE certification is inevitable? [sig][/sig]

 

[DanMc]

Novell's future is definetly unclear at this point. CEO Eric Schmidt is doing a lot of talking though, and he plans to direct all of Novell's efforts into eDirectory (NDS8, SKADS) NDS for NT is becoming very respectable. I don't use it, but it's my understanding that NDS for Solaris is now as reliable as on Netware. A few years ago, we saw Novell trying to corner the Directory services market by leveraging it's Netware Server marketshare. That didn't work too well because Microsoft took server market share, Netware is hard to develop for and we didn't see a lot of NDS apps, and the UNIX world catapulted LDAP into the mainstream. (Directories make great sense in Internet apps, and the Internet doesn't run on Netware) Novell has realized that it can no longer charge good money for a license to share files and printers. Now, we see a more modern and realistic approach (although they may be too late) which is to get NDS talking to all other directories, and running on everything.

As for MCSE as an option, that's really only a short term choice. Desktop Applications are slowly getting replaced by ASP delivered apps. DOT.NET is MS's new plan, and the core MSCE skills of today won't translate to DOT.NET. I think Microsoft has a better chance of pulling off it's total business redesign than Novell, simply because of deep pockets, and developer talent working on such an array of near-monopoly apps. In any case, you'll see a drop in demand for all traditional network admin jobs, which were always there to provide services for the all-important end-user, and their desktop and client-server apps.

Of course you also have to remember that many companies aren't going to adopt this new stuff very quickly. You'll be able to put food on the table supporting a traditional PC LAN for quite some time. [sig][/sig]