When I first started out in my career over 10 years ago, Novell as a company was strong and having a CNE certification was something to be proud of and well respected in the industry and among the I.T. community. Granted, it was a very rigorous and tough curriculum, but I made it and achieved the level of CNE with proficiency in Netware 3.x all the way to Netware 6.5 being used today. Anyhow, Novell as a company makes good products for the enterprise and has a large customer base among both gov’t and prive firms all over the world, but they are seriously lacking in the marketing area and don’t know how to sell their products effectively. Microsoft on the other hand has a very strong and effective marketing team and sells their products quite well, even though it is well known that Windows is bug ridden and Microsoft has yet to fully make a secure product worthy of calling secure. Novell has been preaching to the choire and not targeting the proper audience, thus suffering in their ability to expand to new markets. I have written to Novell and expressed my concerns as a CNE that their failure to properly promote and market their products to new customers and markets is potentially damaging to them as well as to the careers of millions of CNEs’ and CNAs’ out in the field. My complaints fell on death ears as they just can’t seem to get it right. They came out with a few cheesy TV commercials, but unless you already knew who they were or what they were all about, you were left asking yourself “what the hell was that and what are they selling?”. The problem is that Netware today is no longer the legacy file/print server it once was and can now handle streaming media and web services, but Novell keeps marketing it as a file/print server to their own dismay. It’s also funny because Novell is located in Provo, Utah, and consists of predominantly Mormon employees, and if they marketed their products as well as they run around shoving their religion down the throats of others, they would not be in such a bad shape. Microsoft has the upper hand, and even the firm I work for has decided to terminate its relationship with Novell after 10+ years of being an MLA customer and go all Windows/Exchange 2003 instead of mixed Windows 2000/Netware 6 with eDirectory. Our decision to dump Novell was based on business needs because GroupWise is not very popular or even supported among third party sofware developers for wireless devices, and the first mention of Novell or GroupWise gets a very poor reaction from vendors and developers who quickly hang up the phone. Alot of is is bias towards Novell and their products, but a lot of is is Novell’s own doing because they are not doing enough to entice development or partnerships with 3rd party companies and alienating themselves and many of their customers who need GroupWise to be compatible with wireless devices like Blackberries and PDAs’.
