Interview: Part 2
The other thing that this brings to the table is that we can't get to the market ourselves for solutions, and in many respects, our traditional (reseller sales) channel doesn't have the business skills or the solutions experience to reach all the people we need to reach. So what we really need to do is also to get our products sold through solutions providers, like consulting firms like the Big 5 or the Big 6 or whatever you want to call them. Today those people do sell solutions to their clients, but if we can develop solutions in Cambridge that can then be sold not only by Cambridge, not only by Novell, but also through these consulting systems integrators, we have a whole new market available for us, or another way to reach the market.
Do you have a for-instance?
If we can come up with a better way of making PeopleSoft work better in a corporation and tying not only the PeopleSoft database to all the other databases in the company by using our directory--and we have a very tightly integrated set of products that allows that to happen--and we go to one of the firms like KPMG, which as a good PeopleSoft practice, we've given a tool for them to go back into all their PeopleSoft clients and make another sale.
What trends in the industry lend themselves to Novell's expertise in networking and administration of computer users?
Those areas where directories are important and enable functions to take place that other products can't. Our directory is a world-class directory in terms of scalability, reliability and robustness. We've scaled it to 1 billion; we can probably scale it bigger than that. Our selling proposition is: Don't do that, it's too costly. Take our directory, and we'll write you the (software) connector to SAP, to PeopleSoft, to Siebel, and any number of leading applications, and connect them, and you never have to rewrite the underlying databases and applications that you currently use.
The other one is our whole OneNet strategy. When you're a CIO or even a marketing person in a part of the company, this stuff is getting very complex. You're trying to figure out which system to get on and how do you get your data and all that stuff. It's very, very difficult. We have some very unusual capabilities in that area, again, using the directory. The directory allows you to build policy into the system, which says, as an example: If this customer calls in and they're a very big customer, which was identified in the directory, let them have access to our inventory and products, totally. Or if there's a medium-sized customer who calls in, let them have access to our inventory of products, but only half of them. Or say, here's a cold-call customer coming in; only let them have access to this amount of information. You can actually have policies built into the directory to interface with customers and suppliers. That's a very powerful technology.
But can Novell really play a role in what seems like a huge opportunity to personalise a consumer's experience on the Web? And also to develop Web services for those consumers and companies?
Many of the services that we now offer on top of NetWare, which helps create OneNet--those services can easily be changed over to Web services when the market develops for those kinds of things. We used to do file and print services on a network; now we do file and print on the Internet.
How do you get Novell's business growing again?
I think we need to get the solutions written that customers need that pull the products with them. There's a couple of things we've done already. First of all, we've had some cost reductions. We've had a consulting firm give us a study of 150 companies that were in a similar situation to Novell and what they did to create success going forward. And most of them went through a cost-cutting reduction of 20 to 28 percent, and then they stabilized their core products, and then reinvested in new areas. And they did that over a 3- to 4-year period. So I think we've taken the first step of getting our cost structure in line. The second step is to reinvigorate the core, and we think products like NetWare; particularly NetWare 6, ZenWorks and GroupWise--which are legacy products for us--still have a lot of legs. We can still enhance them, still make them useful, and they're still relevant solutions today. The third thing, or course, is to look for the new areas of growth.
There are probably two areas that are of most interest to us. One is security, and we have a lot of security products in our company, the directory being one of the leading security products due to the way it authenticates people, and we're developing a lot of solutions around that. We do have some holes in our architecture, and those holes can either be filled by new product development or making a couple of acquisitions.
What's your view of the potential for Web services?
Obviously it's a hot area. There are a number of companies pursuing it. (Microsoft's) ".Net" is not around the corner--it's a few years away. We believe many of the capabilities that are going to be in Microsoft's .Net when it arrives are in NetWare today with our Net services, so we believe our Net services and our network architecture supports all those technologies that will be in the future.
We haven't done a very good job of marketing all that; we'd probably be the first to admit it. We've basically been a bunch of engineers creating products and hoping somebody would buy them. With the Cambridge folks, we're going to be closer to the customer; we're going to be calling at a different level in the customer's hierarchy, and we're going to be providing better information back to the product people to develop products that our customers want, rather than things that are just gee-whiz, nice to have.
Is it still fair to say Microsoft is still your biggest competitor?
I think many of the battles were client-to-server architecture oriented. Obviously, Microsoft has won that battle; now that we're moving into the Web services area, they are a big competitor, but there's lots of competitors. That's not to diminish the impact that Microsoft has in the marketplace, because anything they see that's good, they copy it and then tie it to their monopoly desktop position.
