Novell Channel Chief Exits; Attachmate-Novell Deal Completed
Novell Channel Chief John Dragoon, who also served as Chief Marketing Officer, has left the company following Novell’s sale to Attachmate, which was completed earlier today. Dragoon disclosed his departure in a blog post. However, a Novell spokesman says channel partners are “valued just as much tomorrow as yesterday.” Here’s the update.
According to a blog entry from Dragoon:
“After nearly 2,740 days at this great company, it’s time to say goodbye … Novell has had many chapters in its 28-year history and today marks the start of a new, exciting chapter. Change brings new opportunities, new adventures, and new teammates. As Novell joins forces with The Attachmate Group, the result will be a powerful portfolio of companies united by a common purpose and dedicated team. I’m confident existing Novell and SUSE customers will continue to enjoy the great relationships and products that they’ve come to expect from Novell. I’m also confident that the spirit, attitude and optimism that are the hallmark of every Novell employee will continue on. It’s been a privilege to be part of Novell’s history. To our customers, partners and employees – a sincere “Thank you.” John”
It’s a safe — though not confirmed — bet that additional Novell executives have left the company now that the sale to Attachmate is official. In multiple SEC filings earlier this year, Novell provide clues about executive incentives and potential departure compensation plans.
Attachmate and Novell are expected to spend the next week or two organizing official messaging before answering media questions about Novell’s channel partner strategy. However, Attachmate and Novell have worked hard to affirm their channel partner commitments ever since Attachmate announced plans to acquire Novell in November 2010. The deal underwent an extensive regulatory review process because Novell also sold certain intellectual property assets to a group of technology companies.
Goodbye (for Now)
Meanwhile, Dragoon’s contributions to Novell will be missed. Admittedly, Novell was never a growth company during Dragoon’s tenure as chief marketing officer and channel chief. And the company certainly struggled to transition from legacy businesses to emerging opportunities. But Dragoon restored Novell’s channel credibility with many VARs and MSPs in recent years.
Some chapters in the history lesson are well documented. Sure, Novell fell from grace with many partners as NetWare imploded in the 1990s and Novell purchased Cambridge Technology Partners — a consulting firm — in 2001. But gradually in recent years, Dragoon helped Novell to promote new brands to channel partners — from SUSE Linux and SUSE Studio to the more recent Novell Workload IQ and Novell Cloud Security Service strategies.
Admittedly, rivals like Red Hat have expanded far more quickly than Novell. And some identity management rivals had stronger brands. But Dragoon was a steadying voice to the media and to channel partners. Sure, The VAR Guy and Dragoon had heated discussions from time to time. Some of the debates focused on Novell’s decision not to acquire open source ISVs. But Dragoon always steered the conversation back to workload management and data center management. Dragoon also played a key role in re-launching Novell’s popular BrainShare conference in 2010, following a hiatus during the U.S. recession and global financial crisis.
The VAR Guy will be watching closely over the next few weeks to see who at Attachmate-Novell steps up to fill Dragoon’s shoes.
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Good riddance to the current Novell mgmt crew. Seriously, the mgmt of Novell for the last 15+ years has done very poorly.
Realistically in the big picture the only time Novell was a growth company was when Netware was growing was in the 1980’s, maybe early 90’s. I think all the key people responsible that have been long gone.
The top mgmt for the last 5+ years seems to have just milked a large amount of salary and bonus out of the place, and any top talent headed for the hills at every other level of the company.
In addition Suse, and trying to combine it with their customer base and field and channel, and boost it, was a good story for the press and some open source types to hold hope for. But the end customer uptake and market dynamics just never were there. Red Hat executed well, did not have old baggage crud to deal with, and beat them very badly. You know how VARs and Resellers work, they don’t want to recommend stuff that will bite them.
Dragoon sounds like he may be a decent guy, but also part of the other crew taking big salary and bonus $ and struggling to figure out a way to get out of the trap they found themselves in since 2000.
Move along, nothing here to see anymore – Attachmate, hm.
Hard to disagree with most of what Mr. Bickel says about Novell. I “bled Novell red” in the 1980s and 1990s. Things got a lot tougher after 2000 for Novell. The CTP acquisition by Novell was a disaster. The “CTP mafia” acted like it bought Novell and not the other way around. The transition from NetWare to OES2 on SLES took way too long to get right. I worked on several of the private OES2 beta tests over the years. While OES2 works OK, it never really generated enough buzz with existing NetWare users. I was excited when Chris Stone returned to Novell for the second time. He had the kind of energy and leadership I thought the company needed to be successful again. Ron Hovsepian seemed like a nice “blue suit” from IBM whose major accomplishment was brokering the 5-year joint marketing, engineering and patent cross-licensing deal with former arch rival Microsoft. But in the end he wound up shopping Novell around for a buyer lest it fall into the hands of Elliott Associates, which it has anyway through their financial dealings with Attachmate. So big paydays for all of the departing Novell executives like Mr. Dragoon now that the Novell stockholders and Feds have blessed the Novell sale to Attachmate. Novell lasted a long time for a high-tech startup from the early 1980s originally knows as Novell Data Systems thanks to Ray Noorda, Craig Burton and those SuperSet” guys led by Drew Major who were the “brains” behind NetWare. I hope the Novell brand endures and prospers in the cloud computing market.
Bill, Tim: The VAR Guy thanks you for your insights/opinions.
Tim: The Chris Stone reference caught The VAR Guy’s eye. Yes, he was a sharp leader at Novell. The company should have tried harder to retain Stone back in the day.
-TVG
Novell desparetly needs a new blood and new bred of Managers.
Its time to overthrow the corroded , lack luster management team and refocus on core engineering to expect any miracles for speedy recovery.
I would like to wish Mr. Dragoon all the best. He is a fine guy. That said, it is hard to disagree with Mr. Bickel and Mr. Wessels. When I think of Novell words like opaque, complex and dysfunctional come to mind. Novell was in perpetual “strategic planning” mode and never seemed to execute anything. The most exciting thing in Novell’s bag was Linux and they treaded water with SUSE at best. Some have estimated that the SUSE support subriptions “sold” by Microsoft exceeded well over $500 million. If you back that out of their marketshare numbers it begs the question; Who, besides Microsoft was buying any SUSE?
Good riddance.
To be honest, most of Ron’s former management team should have been let go years ago. They did little more than rape Novell and take it from a $1.8B+ company down to a $800k company. That’s a legacy they completely own. Dragoon’s work as head of the Marketing division is especially egregious.
If Novell/SUSE is lucky, these guys will get positions at Red Hat and/or Oracle…
HB, kdogwc, MikeE: The VAR Guy appreciates your decision to share constructive criticism. The VAR Guy sees Novell as similar to a newspaper or magazine company. Even as media companies ramp up digital revenues, their print revenues declined rapidly. So the outcome is net flat or slight decline in overall earnings. Novell faced the same challenge. And yes, SUSE Linux has found customers outside of Microsoft. Plenty of SAP and IBM customers have eagerly deployed SUSE.
Can The VAR Guy defend all of Novell’s actions? Absolutely not. Will The VAR Guy watch closely as Attachmate attempts to return Novell to growth? Yup.
-TVG
I worked under several management regimes in Novell and Novell engineers consistently came up with ideas that were WELL ahead of anyone in the industry. Novell management never allowed these ideas to mature. The CTP acquisition was most definitely a disaster and killed much of the superb engineering efforts underway at the time which took Novell’s death spiral to another level. Ron H brought discipline to a lot of areas, but also was not able to lead the company effectively enough to overcome the bad decisions made previously.
The most unfortunate thing here is that the the last management regime at Novell only truly cared about themselves and it is very apparent they never considered the fate of those for which they were responsible. Typical corporate inauthentic greed. Sad indeed.
Novell was once a great company with great employees. I have fond memories of my employment however Novell has a terribly tarnished image that will likely never regain any credibility. It’s time to retire the Novell brand into the archives of the Computer History Museum.
IT’s hard to say what exactly Novell does.
From the Trenches:
I did an upgrade of old Novell Small Business 6 to latest Novell small business suite. Some ways painful but also interesting.
The small busines suite has a lot of Linux and is interesting. Pricing and licensing is very flexible and cheap. Virutalization and server options for redundancy.
Some of the software is getting to Linux standards of logging and web access. I hate their console one. The forums have some very good people. But Novell is not very active in them. It seems like a lot of old Netware users are still hanging on and they have not switched to Linux. Novell has seemed slow to convert them to Linux. I think they are confusing their message with Suse Linux and Open Enterprise Server. Give the Netware people one path and move to it. I believe Netware is supposed to EOL soon and it seems that there is still a lot of old systems out there.
Final thoughts, I was very impressed by some of the software. Tech support is good and at times documentation was very good. But it seems that they are not getting the message out and they have not made their transition to Linux complete.
Just my simple view,
Victor
John@8: Novell has taken some lumps to be sure. But the Novell product lines and services still generates nearly (US)$1 billion in annual revenues. Seems like Attachmate plans to separate the Novell brand from the SUSE Linux brand. Probably a smart move.
Unicorn@9: The VAR Guy thinks the Novell Workload IQ effort was off to a good start. But the company certainly has/had a lot of different product lines… challenging to put all those different brands/initiatives under one Novell roof…
Victor@10: The VAR Guy really appreciates your hands-on analysis. A few thoughts…
A. The Novell Small Business Suite should be retired/transitioned to a cloud suite that partners can active in Amazon.com or elsewhere. The small business server market is under attack from cloud. Novell Small Business Cloud Suite was never a big, mainstream hit. Time to reposition.
B. SUSE Linux and Open Enterprise Server: Yup, might make sense to nudge Netware customers directly to SUSE. Open Enterprise Server is YANB (Yet Another Niche Brand). Attachmate needs to closely evaluate all brands and consolidate a few…
-TVG
The Var Guy@11: The Novell Open Workgroup Suite Small Business Edition or NOWS SBE is the “replacement” for the Novell Small Business Suite that was based on NetWare, which I believe was discontinued a few years ago. Currently, NOWS SBE includes: SLES10, OES2, GW, ZCM, Vibe OnPrem, LibreOffice and SLED.
There was a Novell initiated project to put NOWS SBE into the Amazon cloud a couple of years ago, but I believe the effort was abandoned. Not sure why.
SLES is Linux and OES is Novell’s networking services that used to run on NetWare running on SLES. OES is an add-on product to SLES. The current version is OES2 SP3 and requires SLES10 SP3. Specific releases of OES1/OES2 are tied to particular SLES9/SLES10 versions. I believe Novell is starting up a private beta for the next version of OES that will run with SLES11.
Tim: The VAR Guy appreciates the detailed info. Our resident blogger concedes that he lost track of some of those products. But… The VAR Guy will be sure to ask the SUSE team for an update in the next couple of weeks… once Attachmate-Novell is ready to offer channel updates, etc.
-TVG