Novell, Inc. (pronounced /noʊˈvɛl/;) is a multinational software and services company. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of The Attachmate Group. It specializes in enterprise operating systems, such as SUSE Linux Enterprise and Novell NetWare; identity, security, and systems management solutions; and collaboration solutions, such as Novell Groupwise and Novell Pulse.
Novell was instrumental in making the Utah Valley a focus for technology and software development. Novell technology contributed to the emergence of local area networks, which displaced the dominant mainframe computing model and changed computing worldwide. Today, a primary focus of the company is on developing open source software for enterprise clients.

Novell, Inc., is one of the largest computer networking firms in the world, offering operating software, network management software, hardware, and services. Founded in 1980 as Novell Data Systems, a personal computer manufacturer, the firm spent its venture capital on designing hardware, leaving little money for marketing. By 1982 it was on the verge of collapse, unable to even afford a booth at the computer industry's Comdex trade show in Las Vegas. Raymond J. Noorda, a 58-year-old electronics engineer, saw the company's products in a Las Vegas hotel room and was impressed. Noorda was a 20-year veteran of General Electric Co. who had already turned around other fledgling computer-industry startups, including System Industries, Inc., and Boschert Inc.

Novell owes its beginnings to the Eyring Research Institute (ERI) in Provo, Utah. Dennis Fairclough, Drew Major, Dale Neibaur and Kyle Powell left ERI and took with them the experience and technology to found Novell. Fairclough was the member of the original team that started Novell Data Systems. Major, Neibaur and Powell went on to form SuperSet Software. Fairclough was the original founder of Novell, when Ray Noorda came to Novell, who was dismissed in a route to build upon a new future for Novell. Major, Neibaur and Powell continued to support Novell through their SuperSet Software Group.
At ERI, Fairclough, Major, Neibaur and Powell worked on government contracts for the Intelligent Systems Technology Project, and gained an important insight into the ARPANET and related technologies, ideas which would become crucial to the foundation of Novell.

In March 1990 Novell worked out a merger agreement with the Lotus Development Corp., one of the largest PC software firms and the archrival of Microsoft. The deal would have given Novell $1.5 billion worth of Lotus stock. Novell wanted to tap into the huge customer base of Lotus's top-selling spreadsheet, 1-2-3, which then stood at about five million, while Lotus wanted access to the networking market. The merger would have created the largest PC software company in the world, giving both firms advantages in taking on their chief rival, Bill Gates's Microsoft. Lotus and Novell planned to combine their customer service departments with that of WordPerfect, Inc., a privately held firm specializing in word processing software.
The deal fell apart at the last minute, though, when large Novell stockholders balked. Lotus would have held one more seat than Novell on the board of the new company, and the stockholders were reportedly afraid of becoming Lotus's junior partner in the merged company. Despite the aborted merger, the two firms continued to cooperate in a number of areas.
Novell soon joined with Lotus and other companies, including Apple and Microsoft, to devise a system to prevent tampering with e-mail messages. The goal was to make e-mail reliable enough to use for contracts and permanent records, dramatically expanding the uses of computer networks.
Beginning in 1991 Ray Noorda, Novell's president, chairman of the board, and chief executive officer, reorganized the company, dividing it into three divisions: the core NetWare division, general operations, and an entrepreneurial arm leading a move into huge, corporate-wide networks, which were expected to be the next major development in networking. Many analysts felt the restructuring was initiated to prepare the company for the eventual exit of the 67-year-old Noorda. Novell's share of the LAN market stood at an all-time high of 63 percent, comprising 11,000 companies and 10 million people. Microsoft, however, was spending nearly $50 million a year on networking to catch up with Novell.
One of the important areas of contention between Novell and Microsoft was expected to be the corporate-wide networks. NetWare had primarily been used to help small groups of people share laser printers and data. But the wide-area networks (WANs) needed by large corporations would entail linking hundreds of large and small computer systems, many of them not in the same building, or even the same country. Some corporate executives doubted NetWare's suitability for this task, and Microsoft sensed an opening. IBM, however, had been moving to limit Microsoft's power to set standards, and in February 1991 IBM decided to market NetWare, boosting Novell's position. Later that year Hewlett-Packard agreed to distribute Novell products and to work with Novell on developing and marketing computer network technologies for Hewlett-Packard computers. Compaq also agreed to work with Novell on better integration of networks.
To increase its strength in the growing workstation market, Novell bought a five percent stake in Unix Systems Laboratories, a subsidiary of American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T), in April 1991. Novell and Unix formed a joint venture called Univel to focus on creating products based on the Unix operating system. The firms planned to develop an easy-to-use graphical interface.
Novell then bought Digital Research Inc. for approximately $135.8 million in stock. Digital's DR-DOS operating system, a clone of Microsoft's widely used MS-DOS operating system, was seen as giving Novell some muscle in providing software for file servers. The acquisition prepared Novell for an expected showdown with Microsoft in the networking market. Digital Research became Novell's Desktop Systems Group, which focused on operating systems software that increased the cooperation between workstations and a network. Novell was also working on a joint venture with Sequent Computer Systems to produce a computer able to simultaneously serve as many as 1,000 database users.
In April 1992 Novell continued expanding its multi-company networking abilities through the $5.2 million purchase of International Business Software Ltd., a developer of networking software for Macintosh computers. Novell also signed a marketing and product development agreement with Lotus, allowing the latter firm's widely praised Notes networking software to be more closely connected with NetWare.

However, Novell was also diversifying, moving away from its smaller users to target large corporations, although the company later attempted to refocus with NetWare for Small Business. It reduced investment in research and was slow to improve the product administration tools, although it was helped by the fact its products typically needed little “tweaking” – they just ran.
In June 1993, the company bought Unix System Laboratories from AT&T,[1] acquiring rights to the Unix operating system, apparently in an attempt to challenge Microsoft. In 1994, Novell bought WordPerfect, as well as the Quattro Pro from Borland. These acquisitions did not last. Novell in 1995 assigned portions of its Unix business to the Santa Cruz Operation. WordPerfect and Quattro Pro were sold to Corel in 1996. DR-DOS was also sold to Caldera Systems in 1996.
As Novell faced new competition, Noorda was replaced by Robert Frankenberg in 1994,[2] and was followed by several CEOs who served short terms. One of Novell’s major innovations at the time was Novell Directory Services (NDS), now known as eDirectory. Introduced with NetWare v4.0. eDirectory replaced the old Bindery server and user management technology employed by NetWare 3.x and earlier.
In 1996, the company began a move into internet-enabled products, replacing reliance on the proprietary IPX protocol in favor of a native TCP/IP stack. The move was accelerated when Eric Schmidt became CEO in 1997 and then Christopher Stone was brought in. The result was NetWare v5.0, released in October 1998, which leveraged and built upon eDirectory and introduced new functions, such as Novell Cluster Services (NCS, a replacement for SFT-III) and Novell Storage Services (NSS), a replacement for the Traditional/FAT filesystem used by earlier versions of NetWare. While NetWare v5.0 introduced native TCP/IP support into the NOS, IPX was still supported, allowing for smooth transitions between environments and avoiding the “forklift upgrades” frequently required by competing environments. Similarly, the Traditional/FAT file system remained a supported option.
However, by 1999, Novell had lost its dominant market position, and was continually being out-marketed by Microsoft, which gained access to corporate data centers by bypassing technical staff and selling directly to corporate executives. Microsoft worked to make NetWare look second place with Windows 2000 features such as Group Policy. Microsoft’s GUI was also more popular and looked more modern than the character-based Novell interfaces. With falling revenue, the company focused on net services and platform interoperability. Products such as eDirectory and GroupWise were made multi-platform.
In October 2000, Novell released a new product, dubbed DirXML, which was designed to synchronize data, often user information, between disparate directory and database systems. This product leveraged the speed and functionality of eDirectory to store information, and would later become the Novell Identity Manager and form the foundation of a core product set within Novell.
In July 2001, Novell acquired the consulting company, Cambridge Technology Partners, founded in Cambridge, MA by John J. Donovan, to expand offerings into services. Novell felt that the ability to offer solutions (a combination of software and services) was key to satisfying customer demand. The merger was apparently against the firm’s software development culture, and the finance personnel at the firm also recommended against it. The CEO of CTP, Jack Messman, engineered the merger using his position as a board member of Novell since its inception and soon became CEO of Novell as well. He then hired back Chris Stone as vice chairman and CEO to set the course for Novell's strategy into open source and enterprise Linux. With the acquisition of CTP, Novell moved its headquarters to Massachusetts.[3]
In July 2002, Novell acquired SilverStream Software, a leader in web services-oriented application, but a laggard in the marketplace. The business area called Novell exteNd contains XML and Web Service tools based on Java EE.

In late 1996, Frankenberg had resigned as CEO, and Novell began searching for a replacement equal to the Microsoft threat. In March 1997 it hired Sun Microsystems' chief technology officer, Eric Schmidt, the mastermind behind Sun's Java programming language. By promising to enable business applications to be written independently of any single operating system, Java seemed to threaten Windows' near monopoly on the operating system market. Moreover, the rapid growth of the Internet meant that corporate computers could not only be networked internally but connected to the computers of subsidiaries, vendors, and customers alike--and Windows' lock on the operating system market suddenly seemed increasingly beside the point.
Schmidt believed that, together, Java and the Internet marked the emergence of a new open environment or computing medium that even Microsoft could not hope to control. If NetWare could be retooled and repositioned as the platform through which corporate computer networks could connect their processes to the Internet (via their internal "intranets"), Novell could claim a major niche in the next generation of network software. "We have an opportunity," Schmidt told Red Herring magazine, "to become the primary Internet server platform in corporations as they move to computing platforms fully integrated between themselves and their customers and suppliers." Specifically, Schmidt hoped to position NetWare's Directory Services feature--which gave corporate networks an all-in-one tool for tracking network users, passwords, e-mail addresses, applications, and the like&mdash the indispensable organizing tool to enable corporations to manage the increasingly complex components of Internet-based business computing.
Within weeks of his arrival in 1997, Schmidt cut Novell's workforce by 18 percent, wrote off unsellable NetWare inventory, and set in motion Novell's reincarnation as an Internet-capable networking services provider. NetWare was rechristened IntranetWare, and by the fall of 1997 the first Novell products were released that didn't require customers to own NetWare.
The core of Schmidt's plan for Novell's future, however, was a new product code-named "Moab" that would integrate Internet features and the Java programming language in a single package. When Moab hit the market in 1998, Novell could stand to become the only supplier of a network software solution that replaced the thicket of products corporations had once had to buy separately to manage such tasks as messaging, connecting to the Internet, maintaining intranet security, filtering Web content, and publishing to the Web.
For that day to arrive, however, Novell had to overcome a number of obstacles. Wall Street analysts were taking a wait-and-see attitude toward Schmidt's turnaround strategy, Novell's stock continued to languish, and Novell had a history of missing its deadlines for delivering new products. Moreover, arch rival Microsoft was readying its own version of Novell's Directory Services (named Active Directory) to be integrated in future versions of Windows NT, and sales of Windows NT were on a pace to surpass NetWare's for the first time by 1998. Like many computer firms before it, Novell's rebirth seemed to rest on an unattractive proposition: betting against Microsoft.
Principal Subsidiaries: Fluent, Inc.; Novell de Argentina S.A.; Novell Austria; Novell Belgium B.V.B.A.; Novell do Brasil Software Ltda.; Novell Canada, Ltd.; Novell Columbia; Novell Czech Republic; Novell Denmark A/S; Novell Europe, Inc.; Novell European Support Center GmbH (Germany); Novell Finland OY; Novell GmbH (Germany); Novell Hong Kong; Novell Hungary KFT; Novell International, Ltd. (Barbados); Novell Ireland Software Limited Ireland; Novell Israel; Novell Italia S.R.L.; Novell Korea Co., Ltd.; Novell Latino America Norte, CA (Venezuela); Novell de Mexico, S.A.DE C.V.; Novell Netherland B.V.; Novell Norway; Novell Polska Sp.Zo.o. (Poland); Novell Portugal Informatica LDA; Novell Pty, Ltd. (Australia); Novell S.A.R.L.(France); Novell Services Asia Pacific Pty Ltd. (Australia); Novell Singapore; Novell Software Development Pvt., Ltd. (India); Novell South Africa Proprietary Ltd.; Novell Spain S.A.; Novell Svenska A.B. (Sweden); Novell Schweiz A.G. (Switzerland); Novell U.K., Ltd.; Novell Japan, Ltd.; Onward Novell Software Pvt., Ltd. (India).


Statistics:
Public Company
Incorporated: 1980 as Novell Data Systems
Employees: 5,818
Sales: $1.37 billion (1996)
Stock Exchanges: NASDAQ
SICs: 7372 Prepackaged Software


Statistics:
Public Company
Incorporated: 1980 as Novell Data Systems
Employees: 5,818
Sales: $1.37 billion (1996)
Stock Exchanges: NASDAQ
SICs: 7372 Prepackaged Software

Statistics:
Public Company
Incorporated: 1980 as Novell Data Systems
Employees: 5,818
Sales: $1.37 billion (1996)
Stock Exchanges: NASDAQ
SICs: 7372 Prepackaged Software

Statistics:
Public Company
Incorporated: 1980 as Novell Data Systems
Employees: 5,818
Sales: $1.37 billion (1996)
Stock Exchanges: NASDAQ
SICs: 7372 Prepackaged Software

Address:
122 East 1700 South
Provo, Utah 84606
U.S.A.
 
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