The Executive Computer

Netware's Directory Goes Global, but Users Stay Put

Lawrence M. Fisher
The New York Times

April 17, 1994

"GIVE 'EM what they want" is a reasonable marketing strategy in most businesses. But in the computer industry, fulfilling customers' needs and desires is never simple. Just ask Novell Inc.

For years, customers, competitors and industry pundits decried the lack of a global directory in Netware, Novell's operating system software for computer networks. Last year Novell added this feature, which allows an employee to log on to a corporate network and gain access to files and services wherever he or she may be located throughout the organization, without searching cryptic lists of electronic addresses and without encountering multiple requests for passwords and authorization. Everyone should have been happy.

Yet the tens of thousands of large and small companies that use Netware have been slow to upgrade to Netware 4.0, which contains the directory and other technical advances. Instead, because of the cost and a perceived dearth of supporting software for the newest Netware, many customers have been clinging to various releases of Netware 3 and even the older Netware 2, despite their shortcomings.

A recent study of large corporate Netware users by Forrester Research found that only 29 percent have upgraded at least a portion of their operations to 4.0, while most say it will take 12 to 18 months for them to switch over. Many are "still just thinking about it," the study found.

"People were saying Netware 3.X works fine, it's stable, we love it, and we've got all these other crises to deal with," said Janet Hyland, Forrester's director of network strategy research. "They see a value in this vision of one big network" that is made possible by a global directory, Ms. Hyland said, but "it's not like mainstream Fortune 500 accounts are hot and heavy to do that."

From Novell's standpoint, users' reluctance to move up to Netware 4.0 has helped slow the company's sales growth and put a drag on earnings, which have disappointed Wall Street analysts for several consecutive quarters. While no one thinks Novell is in peril, the company is eager to start seeing a pickup in sales of 4.0.

On Monday, to stimulate those sales, Novell plans to cut the price of Netware 4.0 by 25 percent, making the price range about $50 to $200 per end user, depending on volume, for upgrading from Netware 3.

That previous versions of Netware have lacked a global directory is a legacy of the product's grass-roots evolution.

When Netware was introduced in 1983, it was a program that allowed a handful of personal computers to share a hard disk drive, which was then a costly and scarce resource. The product was commonly adopted by departments within a company, one by one. And as hard disks became ubiquitous, Netware evolved to allow the sharing of laser printers and of file servers -- larger computers that might store key applications and data bases accessible by the desktop computers on the local area network, or LAN.

From various suppliers, internetworking hardware and software products emerged to link multiple servers, so that users on one LAN could gain access to data on another. And other "connectivity" tools have been developed by Novell and others to link the LAN's to the corporate mainframe, or to other computers inside or outside the organization.

This so-called client-server computing, which splits applications between large servers and desktop "clients," has created greater flexibility but also added complexity to the network.

Throughout this process, Netware has evolved apace and retains roughly 70 percent of the market for network operating systems. But because it was originally designed to support perhaps six users within a work group, rather than thousands scattered across a corporation, it never contained a central directory. If a user was logged on to one server, and suddenly needed information on another, she would have to sign on again -- frequently with a different password and a different user name. Chaos could easily ensue.

"This is the typical situation in networks out there today," said Richard W. King, executive vice president and general manager of Novell's Netware Systems Group. "Each server has a different sign-on, a different data base, a different password," he said, "and the whole situation is only getting worse because you have more and more services being added to the network" -- like fax servers, telecommunications and video conferencing.

The advantage of a global directory, Mr. King said, is that "you can establish your user name once, and associated with that is the authorization service, so you don't need to sign on again for any other server on the network." The directory "also really simplifies administration of the network," he said. Granting authorization to a user for a new service becomes a simple matter of using a mouse to drag and drop that user's name onto the directory of services.

So why haven't users rushed to upgrade to Netware 4.0? Aside from the "if it ain't broke don't fix it" hypothesis advanced by Ms. Hyland, the answer comes down to the complexity of the task.

It's worth noting that Banyan Systems Inc.'s Vines software, a long-time competitor to Netware, has always included a directory, because it was conceived of from the start as an enterprise-wide networking system. Yet Vines' market share is dwarfed by Netware's, at least in part because of its greater complexity.

"Directories move you out of the strictly technical decision to the sociopolitical realm of how your company is organized," said Jamie Lewis, president of the Burton Group, a networking consulting firm based in Salt Lake City. Implementing a global directory, he said, "requires an enormous amount of preplanning," and collaboration among the different departments -- each of which must shift from establishing its own set of sign-on and authorization procedures to adhering to a centralized system.

Another issue for Netware 4.0 is that Novell did not make the product backward compatible, meaning that while it can coexist with earlier versions, it cannot interact with them, Mr. Lewis said.

"Until you get all of your servers updated, it makes it harder, because now you have to administer both systems," he said, "and a company with 200 servers is not going to do an upgrade like this overnight. Novell should have come out with a version that allowed people to choose whether to use the directory or not."

Adding to the problem is a lack of software tools to manage tasks like data backups and network management on Netware 4.0. Novell has historically worked closely with independent companies that produce software tools for Netware. But typically, these are small shops that cannot justify the cost of creating new tools until they perceive a demand.

"One of the benefits of Netware 3.X is these tools are out there," said Barry Saltzman, director of advanced client services for Entex Information Services Inc., a systems integrator, which helps companies design and set up their computer systems.

"If you go to the new version, there's basically nothing out there," Mr. Saltzman said. "The tools that are missing were supposed to be in 4.1, then 4.1 was delayed." Among customers, he said, "the confidence level is not high."

Netware 4.1, the first major upgrade of the new version, is now scheduled to be released in the fourth quarter of this year. "We have sites testing some of that technology now," said Mr. King of Novell, although he declined to specify which new tools would be included. But he added that many customers are not waiting for version 4.1. More than 300 of Novell's largest customers are now implementing Netware 4.0, he said.

One consolation for Novell is that the delay in broader acceptance of Netware 4.0 does not appear to be costing it market share. While one might expect customers contemplating such a major change to also consider Banyan's Vines, or the Microsoft Corporation's Windows NT Advanced Server software, which includes networking, Ms. Hyland said the Forrester study found this was not the case.

"We didn't see any kind of large defection, and we looked for it," Ms. Hyland said. "We even find increasing dominance and penetration of Netware. People have little doubt they will go to 4.X; it's a question of when, not if."

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Copyright 1994