Novell to axe products in services push

Novell is to prune back its product lines and focus on delivering services, rather than just technology.

Speaking at the company's Brainshare conference in Salt Lake City, Novell vice chairman Chris Stone said: "We are going to narrow down our solution set to get away from the 163 products to fewer solutions with professional services and consulting. Business solutions built out of our products is our goal."

Novell's chief technology officer Carl Ledbetter told vnunet.com that as much as 15 per cent of the portfolio might disappear relatively quickly.

Some products that go will be built into other products, he said. "Some of them don't make any money and we only sell a handful each quarter. In many cases they aren't really separate products and they are always combined when we sell them. We are really talking about feature sets rather than products in boxes."

The company is being reorganised around the new focus, which will see it concentrating on areas such as identity provisioning, secure partner portal, business process management in government, and access and security.

"It's not a new Novell. It's the same company, we are just getting aggressive. We have to build things that people want to buy and not just things that are technically elegant. The vision is sometimes ahead of the implementation," Stone said.

He said Novell is moving away from proprietory interfaces and will use XML, UDDI and J2EE technologies: "This won't happen overnight but we will get there, and it's something different to what we've done in the past.

"Imagine Groupwise as an XML data store that you can plug other applications in to take advantage of that - that's the direction we are going in. More drop and drag, less type and debug."

Novell will also overhaul its pricing structure as part of its move to services and what Stone described as "solutions".

"As we move to the solutions model our pricing needs to be less about how many objects you have in the directory," he said.

"If you look, some of the products are priced differently inside and outside the firewall. That doesn't make sense and there's a lot of work to do."

But many of Novell's customers will be too small to make use of the new focus, according to Datamonitor analyst Kathleen Klasnic.

"One of the problems is that there's a big difference between the Netware business and the groups they are targeting. Where does the upsell opportunity come in, because not many of their customers are big enough to support these big projects."