NetWare Stalwarts Remain Loyal Despite Dwindling Market Share

Computerworld - The thousands of NetWare faithful meeting this week at Novell Inc.'s annual BrainShare user conference in Salt Lake City will see the latest version of the venerable network operating system as it's released for public beta. And they will no doubt cheer its arrival.

Seventy-nine percent of NetWare users want to upgrade to NetWare 6.5, according to an online poll of 1,042 NetWare users conducted by Computerworld last week. And a nearly equal percentage said they expect to stay with NetWare for "as long as possible," despite projections that show NetWare continuing to lose share in the server operating system market.

Many users said that they want a more consolidated, easier-to-use interface for NetWare and that they wish Novell would finally get its marketing act together. But they continued to overwhelmingly endorse the operating system for its reliability and its lower total cost of ownership compared with competitors' products, the poll found.

"I'd be hurting, personally, if NetWare declines in the next two years," said Doug Boval, systems engineer at St. Vincent Hospital in Indianapolis. "NetWare is awesome, but two to five years from now, it could be snuffed out . . . with more applications taken off NetWare and moved to Windows or elsewhere."

Stephen Millington, technology manager at North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Co. in Durham, said Windows isn't as dependable as NetWare for building a networking infrastructure, and therefore NetWare deserves to survive. "I think NetWare will be around for a while, partly because there's no one shoe that fits everybody's needs," Millington said.

Novell officials can't deny the decline but have stressed that they are transforming NetWare from its traditional role as a network operating system to a set of services, such as a continuous backup and server aggregation. They have also noted that Novell isn't solely reliant on NetWare, which accounted for $361 million, or 32%, of the company's 2002 revenue.

"It's no secret that a NetWare market decline is happening, but we're taking measures to resolve that [by] adding a broad range of technologies that have not been there before," said Tracy Thayne, director of solutions marketing at Novell.

Those technologies include open-source software support and the ability to run Java applications natively on a J2EE server, according to Thayne.

A February forecast by Gartner Inc. projected that the 4% of global server operating system sales that Novell held in 2002 will decline to 1.3% by 2006. Novell introduced NetWare in 1983, long before Windows ran on servers. And by the early 1990s, NetWare had captured 70% of the network operating system market.