Novell rebuilds - hopes to rebound from $122 million 3rd qtr loss - Company Operations - Brief Article

Software Magazine, Oct, 1997 by Ann Harrison

Eric Schmidt brings OMG's Christopher Stone to NetWare country

Amid growing rumors that Novell is ripe for all IBM buyout, Novell CEO Eric Schmidt continues to rebuild a management team to turn around his company's $122 million third quarter losses. The recent appointment of OMG CEO Christopher Stone as senior vice president of strategy and corporate development confirms this trend. Stone, who built a market for OMG's Corba and objects specifications, says these technologies will play a key role in Novelle's future, adding that Novell will build on its network services by creating Java and Corba back ends, as well as APIs and Java front ends. "We are in a hurry," says Stone, who is building an East Coast presence for Novell in Boston. "You've got to have a hot product and you've got to have a strategy that makes sense and has everyone marching to it. That's been one of Novell's issues -- they didn't have either of those for quite some time."

Kevin Workman, supervisor of engineering at San Diego-based Qualcomm, an IntranetWare customer, approves of Schmidt's removal of one-third of Novell's vice presidents. "I wanted to see Schmidt walk through there with an ax," he says. Workman says Novell's distributed object strategy would help objects in his corporate tree communicate with other corporate objects under a veil of trust. "If they have the only proven directory service and a clustering solution in the next 12 months, they could really make some waves in the industry," says Workman.

According to Stone, Novell's strongest market potential is producing point products to manage networks and build and integrate distributed applications. He says these products will be accompanied by security protocol and transaction processing services, as well as a domain-based strategy in telephony and network management. "The platform that Novell will bc selling, whatever it is called at that point in time, will certainly bc using a distributed object model," says Stone.

Novell's turnaround will not bc based on a single product, says Stone, but the collective momentum of NetWare, IntranetWare, and Novonyx's efforts to port Netscape's Web server to the Novell platform.

In an effort to tackle Novell's longstanding marketing problems, John Slitz, a former vice president of object technology and application development marketing at IBM, has been hired by Schmidt to serve as Novell's senior vice president of corporate marketing. Workman says he wouldn't mind seeing IBM acquire Novell as long as the management staff and engineering goals remain intact, but Schmidt insists that he is not grooming the company for a buyout. "He's said publicly it's not for sale and I'll echo that," says Stone, who believes Schmidt is on track to restore Novell's luster. "I won't say [Novell] is turned around, but I'll say he is destined to bring it around and that is one of the Reasons I came to help him do it."