When Novell released quarterly financial results today (Dec. 4), The VAR Guy was curious to see how SUSE Linux sales were shaping up. Here are some answers, along with three other key facts culled from the results.
First, some background: The VAR Guy typically doesn’t blog about financial results. He’s not a financial analyst. He doesn’t own NOVL stock. So why blog about Novell financials? Novell is one of the key companies that will make-or-break open source’s success in the IT channel. And the financial results provide important clues about potential channel directions.
Let’s end the babbling back-story and cut to the chase. Here are four key facts from Novell’s financials:
1. Top-line Revenue: Novell’s overall quarterly revenues were $245 million, flat compared to last year’s corresponding quarter but $5 million below Wall Street’s expectations, according to Reuters.
The VAR Guy’s Spin: Bummer. But our resident blogger isn’t so concerned about Novell’s top-line revenues. Rather, he’s preoccupied with SUSE Linux revenue growth.
2. SUSE Linux Revenue: According to Novell’s press release, the company “reported $36 million of product revenue from Open Platform Solutions, of which $33 million was from Linux Platform Products, up 33% compared to the same period last year.”
The VAR Guy’s Spin: Mixed reaction. Thirty-three percent growth is impressive in a horrendous economy.
But consider this: Novell says it generated $120 million for the year from Linux Platform Products. That’s not much money within the overall IT industry, and it speaks to a broader industry problem: Open source companies are still struggling to monetize their code.
3. Identity and Security Management: Here, Novell says revenue was $37 million, of which Identity and Access Management was $35 million, up 11% compared to the same period last year.
The VAR Guy’s Spin: This is the area where Novell and The VAR Guy don’t really see eye to eye. Novell has articulated how it wants to offer customers the most secure, reliable platforms from desktops to data centers.
But within that rhetoric, it’s still difficult to see how Novell’s SUSE Linux and security offerings fit together, enhance one another, or drive up-selling opportunities between each other.
When was the last time you heard about a SUSE Linux solution provider that also thrived with Novell’s indentity and security management solutions? The VAR Guy would like to see — and hear — far more about customers that are using SUSE Linux and Novell’s identity/security management offerings as a complete enterprise solution.
4. Partner Strategy: Novell in recent months has announced a new channel chief and also evangelized its growing ISV (independent software vendor) program. But the company’s financial release only mentioned “expanding partnerships” in passing.
The VAR Guy’s Spin: It’s still a bit too early for Novell to disclose how its new channel chief is performing. But over the next 2 quarters, it will be critical for Novell to describe ISV and channel partner progress in financial results.
The Bottom Line: The business that matters most to Novell’s future — SUSE Linux — continues to grow. And the Microsoft relationship, however controvercial in the open source community, has restored Novell’s credibility with quite a few CIOs, The VAR Guy believes.
In recent months, Novell has successfully articulated its strong relationships with SAP and Microsoft. But the company needs to build — and evangelize — similarly strong relationships with open source application leaders like MySQL, SugarCRM, and so on. Sure, Novell works with a range of open source ISVs. But that work needs to accelerate.
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I’ve got a novel idea for Novell. Pay your salespeople and your channel partners to sell your solutions. I find that when one stops paying salespeople, they don’t give up and go home, but rather they find something else to sell. Microsoft continues to be a natural choice for the small VAR to go to. The margins are much better there, and Microsoft continues to energize it partners with other incentives as well. This is what creates excitement in a solution for the small reseller. Without incentive there is NO excitement, just as there is no excitement watching this stock trade at the same low prices over the next year.
HurdyGurdy: The VAR Guy is neither a Novell salesperson nor a Novell channel partner. But for the right price, he’d be willing to consider it
“When was the last time you heard about a SUSE Linux solution provider that also thrived with Novell’s indentity and security management solutions? The VAR Guy would like to see — and hear — far more about customers that are using SUSE Linux and Novell’s identity/security management offerings as a complete enterprise solution.”
*Raises Hand* We run the following – SLES 10 with OES 2 – Domain Services for Windows – Identity Manager between AD, eDir, JDBC, SQL databases. Data cluster and Directory services (besides the one AD server) are all SLES 10. No SuSE desktops yet, but Novell is offering a free 30 seat license for SLED right now to it’s customers. That’s big incentive to turn 30 computers from windows over to linux and get the ball rolling. For free no doubt!
And if you recall we already came to the determination previously that noone makes money selling Novell operating system software. In summation, keep your day job or sell Microsoft, they pay their small channel partners well.
“The VAR Guy would like to see — and hear — far more about customers that are using SUSE Linux and Novell’s identity/security management offerings as a complete enterprise solution.”
*raises hand*
We run Directory Services, Identity Manager, Data Clustering, Mail, and DSfW all on SLES 10/OES2 SP1. Aside from our 1 AD server, everything is Novell, and the Ident Manager solution prodvides synchronization between all our databases.
It’s nice to see a positive article on Novell.
Unless Microsoft gives them some more money to stay in business, Novell has exactly one trick, if your directory services need to scale to over a million objects, AD doesn’t and can’t work, and NDS does, I would think that this having been the case for years now, that Novell could really make in-roads based on this, instead, they seem to resigned themselves to nichedom. If Novell contacted everyone who had ever been a CNE and offered them a free training “update”, and certification, and made their old management tools like rconsole run on their new Suse servers, they would be a major player in the market, in the meantime, they are coming off as an old-guard company that bought a free software company, and now they are trying to sell free software just like they sold their old code.
@HurdyGurdy – you hit the nail on the head. Novell treats it’s direct sales people the same way as they treat their partners. Make a great deal and it will get yanked from under you in order not to pay you. One big reason for the mass exodus of their best talent over the past few years.
@TheVarGuy – Novell refuses to capitalize on creating solutions within their own ranks. Novell has some of the best opportunities for partners by creating solid solutions with IDM/SLES/ZEN combinations that solve severe pain points inside mid-market companies, yet they REFUSE to create programs to work with these partners and continue to silo and alienate.
Let’s not forget all the money Novell has to pay Microsoft for it’s CERTIFICATES.
I wonder what the cost is per MS Certificate per SUSE linux sold is? Is it 10, 15, or 50% of the sale per SUSE linux sold?
If it is more than 25%, than you can add 25 million to Novell’s profits.
Also, in regards to Novell’s ISV partnerships. I would be VERY VERY worried on what language stack Novell would recommend ISV, programming on SUSE Linux use. If it is MONO, than the Open Source community has MUCH MUCH to fear, and will only lock in SUSE Linux ISV’s into yet more of Microsoft Intellectual Property, and therefore patents.
If, SUSE ISV’s stay clear of MONO (.NET) than we are OK.
@Matt: How does Novell pay Microsoft??? Don’t you mean Microsoft pays Novell? And just to give Novell equal time, Chief Marketing Officer John Dragoon says even without the Microsoft deal, Novell’s Linux sales would be growing as fast as — or perhaps faster than — the overall Linux market.
The VAR Guy isn’t suggesting that Novell is problem free: There are still a lot of “legacy” issues, and partner programs need to be rebuilt. But you can’t ignore SUSE Linux’s growth. Or can you?
> How does Novell pay Microsoft??? Don’t you mean Microsoft pays Novell?
You got it all wrong.
Hey Guys (and Gals – I have two adult daughters)
Novell should go after the small and mid-market folks. I know no one makes money selling Novell s/w (and for that matter many other manufactuers packages). You make money selling the hardware (at least some), install, support, etc. Lots of small and mid-size businesses probably have a number of Novell servers that are getting old. With OES2SP1 (Open Enterprise Server Service Pack 1) and lets say a dual socket, quad core box and 8 to 12 Gigs of RAM, you could put three to five servers on one box “happily”. Each will stay individual and you could get much better performance. I would recommend keeping on separate box so that the Novell Tree would have replication off the main system.
Harryl46: The VAR Guy can’t see anyone in small business purchasing Open Enterprise Server. Seems like a very, very niche solution and it isn’t even Novell’s core focus over the long haul.
As far as I’m aware, Novell is paying Microsoft to sell Suse coupons in return for the investment that is just about making them break even.
As for OES, it really had better be a focus for Novell. Netware is, or was, a several hundred million dollar revenue stream for Novell, and the lion’s share of the revenue still comes off the back of it. The proportion of their new Linux revenue to their existing Netware and work group revenues is still small, but the work groups revenues are still declining and Suse revenue is nowhere near being able to take over.
In addition, what people miss in this is that Microsoft are Novell’s biggest competitor. It is Windows Server that is taking away share from Netware and the work group business, and unfortunately, OES is not a Netware improvement to people nor does it compete adequately with the functionality Windows Server has. In essence, it actually seems to be worse than Netware because it is driving traditional Netware people away. That’s what Novell needed to do when they took over Suse – go into the open source world and build themselves something that would kick out Windows Server as a threat that would ultimately put them out of business and open source as many parts of Netware as they needed and get people using it again. They didn’t do that, and they even picked the wrong software for what they did produce after having large internal rows about it.
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