Novell Plans More Licensing Deals
Novell on Tuesday said it plans to seek out more deals similar to its recent marketing and licensing pact with Microsoft as it embraces partnerships and moves away from selling its open-source software directly to small and medium-size companies.
Ron Hovsepian, Novell's CEO for the past five months and president since November 2005, said in a conference call with analysts that the planned changes stopped short of a full restructuring at Novell, which has undergone several leadership and corporate changes in the last several years.
For its fourth quarter, the company reversed its net loss from the prior year. However, its net revenue continued its year-long slide, as Novell continued to struggle with converting corporate customers from its legacy NetWare operating system to SUSE Linux.
And its recent controversial deal with Microsoft probably won't help much in the short term. That deal is expected eventually to contribute about US$300 million to Novell's bottom line overall, but the company only expects to record about US$20 million in revenue from it next year, leaving its net revenue and profits for 2007 basically unchanged from 2006.
It is difficult to find a better case of bad timing than Novell's announcement this week that it would be implementing support for Microsoft's OpenXML format in its (Novell's) version of OpenOffice.org.
Novell has already been hammered left, right and centre after it signed a deal with Microsoft in November. If anything, one would expect that it would studiously avoid doing anything even remotely seen to be aiding Microsoft.
But, on the very day when Computerworld carried a detailed yarn about how Microsoft tried to foist its so-called open standard - OpenXML - on the US state of Masschusetts, in preference to the open document format (ODF) which OpenOffice.org supports as a default, Novell came out with what can only be termed a silly move.
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