September 8, 1997

Novell Licen ses Toolkit To Aid NetWare Migration Free offering seeks to keep customers By Monua Janah n an effort to help customers migrate to the latest release of its network operating system, Novell last week licensed a toolkit that automates much of that migration, and agreed to provide the toolkit to customers at no extra charge. Under the agreement with Simware Inc., Novell is offering the Rexxware Migration Toolkit, via the Web site of Simware, in Ottawa. Previously, RMT cost $795 per server. Written in the Rexxware language, RMT provides a simple process map that takes users through the steps involved in migrating to NetWare 4.x. Terms of the license agreement weren't discl osed. Analysts say that of the 67 million NetWare users worldwide at the end of 1996, only 33 millionwere running NetWare 4.x. For Novell, after two dismal financial quarters and major layoffs, it's become a matter of some urgency to persuade customers to move to later releases of its network operating system-particularly since Novell Directory Services, a strategic technology for Novell, is available only with NetWare 4.0 and higher. Lee Doyle, an International Data Corp. analyst, says the pattern of slow migration isn't unusual. "To draw an analogy to desktop operating systems, you'll find a huge number of people still using DOS or Windows 3.x," he says. "People don't migrate unless they have a compelling reason to; for Novell users, that has been either that they are a more recent purchaser and therefore buy the latest version, or that they're a large organization that finds value in 4.x, including NDS." Ben Lamboy, VP of network operating system engineering at Chase Manhattan Bank in New York, says he's interested in the toolkit because it takes away the need to cost-justify a migration of the bank's more than 1,000 servers. But not all users are sold. John Pawluk, supervisor of distributed technology services at Cargill Inc., says the Minneapolis agricultural products company looked at RMT and instead opted for DS Standard, a tool from Preferred Systems, now a unit of Computer Associates. For others, the toolkit arrives too late. "We were a NetWare 4 user," says Niraj Patel, CIO of GMAC Commercial Mortgage Corp. But when upgrading its network, the company migrated to Windows NT Server. "One of the main reasons was that NT provides pure IP to the server," Patel says. "We didn't want to support any other protocols on our network." Back to News in Review Send Us Your Feedback Top of the Page

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