The vast numbers of small to mid-sized businesses (SMBs) that are still using aging IT components that are not supported any more by the original vendors might represent a target market for Novell’s desktop-to-server software suite.

“We have constructed an offering that makes the migration very simple and that comes at an extremely attractive price point,” said Ross Chevalier, CTO and CIO for Novell Canada. “The goal here is that this customer and the reseller partner don’t have to now go and find 15 other products or vendors to make it all work.”

The company’s new software suite includes Novell GroupWise for e-mail, task management and calendaring, Open Enterprise Server for storage, print and management services and the OpenOffice office productivity suite. Other features include Amanda for backup and archiving, the ClamAV anti-virus toolkit, HylaFAX fax server, iptables for firewall, MailScanner for spam filtering, the OpenVPN virtual private network and TightVNC for remote control of network clients.

Priced at $350 (U.S.) for every five users, the Novell software is designed for companies with up to 200 users and five servers.

However one industry analyst questioned whether the Novell offering — as attractive as it might be — would garner many small business customers, as the majority tend to be Windows-oriented.

“Anybody could install [the new Novell product] with a click of a couple of buttons. But a lot of small businesses are just not comfortable with Linux; they are not familiar with it,” stated Vince Londini, research analyst with Info-Tech Research Group.

Novell would have to work very hard to convince channel partners, he continued.

“It is key that channel partners see the value of it. It will be at that grassroots level, where the VAR comes in to the small business that is not technically savvy and proposes them a solution that can make the VAR money as well as make some money for the small business.”

The exception may be the small portion of small business that are highly technical, software oriented, develop code and may be very attracted to solutions in Linux, Londini added.

Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group, noted that Novell faces the old challenge that sales to small businesses radically differ from what can be sold to large enterprises.

“Generally, SMB is more comfortable with turnkey solutions or services based offerings,” he said. “For the most part, with some clear exceptions, they don’t see open source as an advantage because they could not read source code if their collective lives depended on it.”

Enderle suggested that small businesses would be more attracted to an Apple Computer solution than open source.

“This [Novell] offering is not positioned properly for the broad small business segment to meet that case of user requirement,” he added.

By Paul Weinberg
www.echannelline.com

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 24th, 2007 at 12:14 am and is filed under Linux/Open Source [t], Microsoft Network [t], Wireless Network [t]. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.