Nakoma Nudges Novell Into .Net Realm ...

Computerworld - ... and may give Microsoft Corp. fits as it tries to sell IT shops on its Visual Studio .Net. The next major facelift for NetWare, code-named Nakoma and expected to ship in mid-2003, will come with Novell Inc.'s exteNd application development environment bundled for free. Granted, there are millions of Visual Studio pros out there ready to migrate to .Net. And there are, well, to be kind, not millions of app creators using Novell tools for Web services. In fact, zero is a closer number. But the strategy makes sense, according to Corey Ferengul, a VP at Meta Group in Stamford, Conn., who argues that there are two things in Novell's favor. One, it's early in the Web services game, and "no one has an advantage." Two, NetWare operations staffers are often wary of apps "thrown over the fence by the development side" when they can do things themselves. Let's add a third: ExteNd is a simple way to leverage Java technology, which has no small amount of momentum behind it. And maybe a fourth: It's free, and Visual Studio .Net is anything but. Still, Novell's marketing misfits continue to stumble, at least as far as the silly rendering of the product's name: exteNd. Sheesh!
• One of the industry's largest and oldest privately held software companies, Candle Corp., has also taken liberties, in its case with the spelling of its WebSphere application infrastructure management environment, PathWAI, which gets unveiled this week. PathWAI combines products, services and training with fixed prices for a variety of tools. They range from $17,000 to $100,000, depending on the bundle, according to VP David Caddis. He says Candle has targeted gaps in IBM's WebSphere product line in the areas of architecture design, development, deployment and planning, as well as with monitoring and dashboard systems. He acknowledges that Candle is "plugging a hole that may go away someday" because IBM may go after it on its own - a strategy the company has finessed since 1976. Which just goes to prove that even if you're a big pilot fish, the shark is always bigger. (Apologies to Computerworld's own ravenous Sharky.)
• Garbage in. Garbage in. That's the problem with poor data quality. Bad data stays bad unless you know something about its source. Greg Leman, CEO of Durham, N.C.-based Metagenix Inc., claims that data quality problems affect as much as 10% to 15% of stored information, especially because information gets moved from one source application into another, such as when companies move supplier data into