Network operating systems Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Network operating systems - Essay Example Novell was licensing Novell Directory Services to all comers, the idea being to seed the market and make NDS a de facto standard that will increase demand for Novell's directory-enabled applications. While these licensing deals didn't expected to produce much revenue at this point, that might change down the road if third parties start including NDS in products instead of building their own directories. As Robert Harbison says, "That's where Microsoft is really great. Microsoft shipped NT 4.0 with a sampler CD full of third-party applications from its ISVs. Novell has to do a lot more to help promote NDS applications." Distinguishing feature of Novell's approach to network operating systems is understanding of importance of middleware technologies, for example NDS' unparalleled cross-platform support is particularly appealing to Tivoli. "Microsoft has traditionally misunderstood the importance of certain middleware technologies and how important it is for them to be cross-platform in nature," says Tom Bishop. "Active Directory is fine for pure NT shops, but Novell's NDS strategy has some real appeal in the more heterogeneous environments that we target." It is mentioned by Breidenbach that NDS is now available on Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX, IBM's AIX, Caldera's Linux and The Santa Cruz Operation's Unix, Sun Solaris and IBM's S/390. NT is already supported by NDS, but only in environments with at least one NetWare server. A version of NDS that runs directly on NT without NetWare was due out in summer of 1999; it would enable users to build pure NT networks but still employ NDS. This approach of Novell differs a lot from Microsoft's Active Directory Technology that is available only for Windows platform. As a result, Novell's NDS can be implemented on various operating systems but do not help to promote Novell's operating system Novell Netware, while software products of Microsoft run only in Microsoft Windows environment. Another distinguishing feature of Novell's approach to network operating systems is collaboration with switch vendors. As Breidenbach writes, part of Novell's strategy for boosting NDS' role in enterprise nets is getting switch vendors on board. The company has been scoring big with the likes of Lucent, Nortel Networks and Cisco announcing varying degrees of support for NDS. At the same time Microsoft do not work with switch vendors so close. 2 Given all this good technical stuff, why is Novell close to bankruptcy and Microsoft Networks are taking over the planet I think that the main reason of Novell's difficult financial situation is thoughtless marketing strategy. It was a mistake trying to enter desktop operating systems market. Failure in this attempt had caused loss of trust of many potential customers. Breidenbach writes about this in the article. "Novell was on top and got dethroned," says high-tech marketing guru Geoffrey Moore. "When that happens, the market is extremely reluctant to reenfranchise such a company, even if it has the best product." "And the number of ISVs is meaningless," Moore adds. "The issue is what the power players are doing. Cisco and Microsoft have the strongest positions, so a solution that doesn't have their endorsement isn't likely to get very