Users Back Novell Plan for NetWare-to-Linux Path

Computerworld - Salt Lake City—With the announcement last week that Novell Inc. has tapped Linux as the migration path for NetWare, users said they finally have reason to believe that the folks in Novell's executive suite are as savvy as its engineers.

At its BrainShare 2003 user and partner conference here, Novell announced that NetWare 7 will be a set of services sitting on top of both the NetWare and Linux kernels. NetWare 7 is due to succeed NetWare 6.5, which entered public beta-testing last week.

"We are not dropping NetWare; we are adding Linux," said Jack Messman, Novell's chairman and CEO, in a keynote speech to BrainShare attendees. "This is not a departure from NetWare. We will not abandon you, and you need not abandon us."

That's just what many NetWare users wanted to hear.

"The way they're migrating the operating system -- going to a modular format -- makes a lot of sense," said Michael Gardner, a senior systems engineer at Munder Capital Management, a financial services firm in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. NetWare "has always stood there as one of the more stable operating systems; it just wasn't as usable. Now they're making it more usable with Linux."

Gardner acknowledged that his company, a steadfast Novell user, had some concerns about NetWare's future.

Although there is no official ship date for NetWare 7, Messman said Novell will follow its standard timeline of approximately 18 months between NetWare releases.

Messman said users who are paying maintenance fees will have the option to eventually migrate from the NetWare kernel to Linux. "It's a good migration path for NetWare users who were worried about where we were going with NetWare," he said.

Ensuring that file, print, storage, directory, Web development, resource management and other NetWare services will be available for the long haul "gives customers comfort," Messman added.

"I think it's a good strategy," said Elizabeth Lenzi, manager of IT at Prevent Child Abuse America. Officials at the Chicago-based nonprofit organization "had a lot of concern" about where Novell was heading with NetWare, she said. "It seems like they're coming back strong, hopefully."

Even some users who said they lacked such worries are supporting the Linux strategy.

"It sounds like a great idea," said Victor Ponelis, a NetWare technologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "For my part, there's no concern that NetWare is going to go away. We will simply adapt as the industry adapts." If the NetWare kernel goes away, he added, "the services will be running on something else."

Novell Vice Chairman Chris Stone said the decision to offer the Linux migration path was driven by users. "They were looking for an open door," Stone said. "We all know that NetWare's revenue has been dipping over the years. So what do you do? You take the services and you make them the value."