Novell Disappoints as Ownership Concerns Continue (Datamation) [LWN.net]

Datamation looks at Novell's third quarter financial results, which have fallen short of the company's projections. "The decline in revenues in the third quarter extended across Novell's multiple product lines, including its security-management and operating platforms, as well as its Linux business. Novell's reported revenue of $108 million for its security-management and operating platforms, down 2 percent year-over-year. Earlier this week, Novell announced a new cloud security service to manage access, identity and compliance. Novell's SUSE Linux platform products revenue in the third quarter netted $36 million, a decline of 7 percent from the third quarter of 2009. " (Thanks to Don Marti)

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Novell Disappoints as Ownership Concerns Continue (Datamation)

Posted Aug 31, 2010 9:41 UTC (Tue) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link] (1 responses)

And here is Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols' commentary: perhaps VMware should buy Novell?

Novell Disappoints as Ownership Concerns Continue (Datamation)

Posted Aug 31, 2010 14:21 UTC (Tue) by busterb (subscriber, #560) [Link]

Don't you mean EMC? http://www.emc.com/products/family/vmware-family.htm

Novell Disappoints as Ownership Concerns Continue (Datamation)

Posted Aug 31, 2010 16:11 UTC (Tue) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link] (2 responses)

He, nice self fulfilling prophecy going on here :D

The more everyone will say it's going bad, things will go bad - customers loose trust in the company, the company thus looses money etc etc.

Meanwhile, are things really that bad?

Not that this is Novell-exclusive, Red Hat has the same stuff going on every now and then, as do lots of other companies. The sillyness of markets.

Novell Disappoints as Ownership Concerns Continue (Datamation)

Posted Sep 1, 2010 8:16 UTC (Wed) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link] (1 responses)

That's the exact reason why Microsoft buys so much space in the press (by means of producing silly news like the amount of money they waste in producing the startup sound...) They are just sending out a "we are alive and kicking" message without explicitly saying so (that would be counterproductive).

Novell should start spending some pocket money in the kind of stuff news outlets like to publish when they have nothing better to say.

Novell Disappoints as Ownership Concerns Continue (Datamation)

Posted Sep 2, 2010 23:24 UTC (Thu) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link]

Novell's problems don't have much if anything to do with too little press. The problem they have is that all the measures wall street uses to measure growth and stability are pointing to decline. To summerize,

Every single market segment and product line declined in sales. If that trend continues they are out of business. This even includes SUSE which was the one product line they were telling wall street would keep growing. Basically all the old Netware revenue has been declining substantially every quarter for the last decade, they lose something like 25% of their legacy software revenue every quarter. This was the only area they previously made money in. The direction they have been giving Wall Street is that even though the legacy products are declining in revenue they expect that the linux and services division will grow and replace the revenue in time. Well what happened this quarter is that Linux and services declined, that basically made management a bunch of liars and will naturally hurt stock prices and bring up rumors of mergers and acquisitions and even bankruptcy.

Hopefully it was a one time blip, but if they have quarter on quarter declines in Linux and Linux services revenue kiss Novell goodbye, they will either be acquired, split up or auctioned off. You can't tell Wall Street a certain business segment is your long term future and then have that segment go in the toilet and survive. Worst case scenario is that Yarro and his companions could try to get the Unix assets and attack Linux again with a baseless lawsuit. Best case is the Novel directors and management are replaced, the organization is streamlined, unprofitable divisions jettisoned and a deeper commitment to Linux and FOSS business models ensues. Either Way Novell is in trouble and they need new blood that understands FOSS better at the helm. They still spend too much money and effort on dead software (Netware).