Novell to chop 600 jobs

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Does this make sense to you?: The article quotes an analyst and Novell's marketing director, and both appear to contradict themselves.

Here's the analyst:
Restructuring is necessary for the company, said Katherine Egbert, a Jefferies securities analyst. "Shareholders don't always know best, but in this case it's clear they have some businesses that are in decay," including NetWare, ZenWorks and GroupWise, she said. "They're doing what they have to do."

A business in decay presumably means one which is not of interest to customers.

Continuing the quote:
But Egbert doesn't Wednesday's changes are enough. "They've chronically [sic] said the goal for Linux is not to build a Linux-based business," as rival Red Hat has done, she said. "The goal is to make themselves relevant and to upsell customers with GroupWise and ZenWorks and identity."

GroupWise and ZenWorks are among the businesses in decay.

Does this mean that customers are expected to be so pleased to have Novell's Linux that they will suddenly become interested in GroupWise and Zenworks? Why?

At least with NetWare there's a combined product that presumably improves NetWare. (Or not, see next quote.)

Here's the Novell marketing director:
The company is trying to boost popularity of its Suse Linux Enterprise Server product. When customers buy NetWare, Novell now includes Linux in a double-whammy product called Open Enterprise Server.
The Linux side of the equation is on the rise, said Bill Hewitt, chief marketing officer. "As we migrate customers from NetWare to OES, we're putting more resources in OES and less in NetWare," Hewitt said.

So let's see, "when customers buy Netware" SuSE is included. What are they buying? Netware.

What is Novell doing about Netware? They're taking resources away from it to concentrate on the Linux portion, which is not what customers are buying.

Now if he'd been talking about building a package that makes Netware better...
But this is Novell marketing, isn't it?!; Posted by: Anton Philidor Posted on: 11/02/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use