Comments on: Will Novell, Dell turn to open-source M&A to grow?

The two companies are looking toward acquisitions to grow revenue, but they need to be pragmatic about what to expect from open source.

[Random_Walk]

Not so sure if Dell could even swallow EMC, let alone digest it. Remember, EMC is VMWare's daddy (albeit the relationship is somewhat estranged, what with VMWare's coding team being partial to NetApp these days)... and IIRC, EMC has more than a couple of smaller companies in its own gullet, which it in turn hasn't quite digested yet.

Equilogic is still somewhat shaky as well - I remember the reps for them in our area being somewhat too enamoured of their product to give solid and comparative answers as to why their non-standard (damned brilliant, but non-standard) SAN solutions would/should replace our existing gear.

Dell aside, Novell could do good with a few acquisitions - this I can definitely agree on. They could stand to bolster their datacenter creds, and maybe shake off the schizophrenia that once gripped (and in some cases still cripples) most commercial Linux distros ( "desktop or server? - what do we concentrate our image on?")

OTOH, they could do with a more aggressive sales team as well. RedHat has the luxury of word-of-mouth and partner relationships. Ubuntu has the buzz, the cred, and most sysadmins nowadays can do the selling for them. Novell? Well, you don't really see Novell during an RFQ round unless you're at a Fortune 500 corp. Maybe that's just a Pacific Northwest thing, but it's disturbing.

One more gripe - why can't Novell seem to take the good bits of their catalog (ZenWorks, OpenXchange, etc), integrate it into SuSE, open-source as much as they can of it, and pimp the crap out of it? They have solid products - with just OpenXchange, if they would just get off their butts and _market_ the damned thing, they could make a solid dent in Microsoft's Exchange biz in very little time (especially since MS Exchange 2k7 released - which is a resource-sucking and expensive mess, even if you know what you're doing...)

Heh. Anyhoo, I think that in short, Novell needs to acquire a few solid companies, yes... but they need to fix some fundamentals internally as well. (and bring BrainShare back! Sure, Salt Lake City is boring, but damn...)

[damiandennison]

Dam, I agree with you about the Novell. They can do very well with what they currently have if they would just think, grouping together the products and making lowering the price would make them more attractive.

[pzb2]

OpenXchange is not part of Novell, I think you might be confused as OpenXchange and SUSE offered a joint product before Novell bought SUSE

[Random_Walk]

I'm well aware that Novell inherited OpenXchange... but they own it now (and have owned it for years), yet you hear more about Zimbra than you do about OX...

[Random_Walk]

crap - I goofed. The proper name is "Open Exchange" (a different product entirely...)

My apologies.

[mbenedict]

Um, no, they were the SAME product, renamed after Novell spun it off to a separate company, YEARS ago.

[rafbuff]

SUSE had a product called SUSE Linux Openexchange Server between 2002 and 2004. Novell discontinued selling it. It was based on SLES and Open-Xchange, which was and is made by an is an independent company. http://www.open-xchange.com/en/company for more.

From the fact that Novell discontinued selling this very successful product makes your point, too.

Rafael

[mbenedict]

OpenExchange (SLOX) was an exciting product to many, but it was never successful and in fact might have been a money loser. There were many problems with it:

1. Poor support for desktop clients. OpenExchange had to be accessed through its web UI to enable most of its functionality. If you used something like Outlook then you can't do much more than basic mail (and in that case, why not just get a mail server). Problem was, back in 2002, we didn't have slick AJAX interfaces nor fast scripting engines... most companies still ran IE 5 for Pete's sake... and people HATED using a crappy Web UI all day long.

2. SLOX wasn't open, didn't even run on Linux... by that I mean, it was only supported on it's OWN special version of SUSE. If you're a RedHat shop, too bad for you. If you have Debian, tough luck, not supported. Solaris? Haha. Ironic for a system called "OpenExchange". Many shops already had a hard time justifying running RedHat alongside Sun or Windows, now they're forced to run a special version of SUSE too? Not a chance.

3. OpenExchange was composed a bunch of open source projects "bundled" together... some might say not very well. For example its email server was just postfix. The spam filter was spamassassin. Then there's samba and CUPS for printing. You had to tune & configure EACH of these manually, from the command line. The people who knew how would just download the separate packages from the 'net. The people who didn't know how, preferred MS Exchange administration.

4. On top of that, SLOX documentation was poorly put together. You pretty much had to figure out its component pieces and find documents for them on the 'net.

5. No anti-virus. An enterprise messaging system with no integrated anti-virus solution? Marketing fail.

6. Price. For a large department, SLOX costs about $2k let say. MS Exchange about $10k list. But, departments tend to buy other products... say their users want Office Suite, and/or they have an MS SQL Server app... so the MS sales guy can price Exchange as part of a package... say $7k effectively. Still $5k advantage to SLOX. But for a department that's spending $250k+ a year just on a few admins' salary (not counting infrastructure costs, etc) the $5k difference didn't really matter. Even $10k difference didn't really matter if they can run all the same OS (say Solaris) instead of supporting a one-off SUSE box.

7. CIO says no. This was one of their biggest problems. The CIO or VP Tech looks at the product, decides it's not "mature", not part of the company's architectural "strategic" direction (which meant Sun or Microsoft), or insists on having Outlook instead of a Web UI. At the CIO's office, SLOX was dead on arrival.

8. It competed with Novell's Groupwise. Internal politics meant a lot of people within Novell wanted to kill SLOX after the SUSE acquisition. It made NO SENSE for Novell to have two collaborative platforms which competed against each other. The writing was on the wall and they killed SLOX (well, spun it out as a separate concern, but the effect was pretty much the same.)