Several of Novell‘s top executives — including Ronald W. Hovsepian, Dana C. Russell, John K. Dragoon, Colleen A. O’Keefe, Scott N. Semel and James P. Ebzery — have exited the company following Attachmate‘s recent buyout of Novell. Sources say Novell has made additional staff cuts. Next up, Attachmate and Novell must move quickly to publicly describe Novell’s channel, collaboration and security strategies going forward. The good news: Novell’s partner program remains unchanged. The big question: Which Novell executive will lead that program going forward?
The Novell executive departures were disclosed in an April 28 SEC filing. The VAR Guy thinks some of the departures were easily predicted while others were somewhat surprising. For instance…
- Hardly surprising: The exits of CEO Hovsepian, CFO Russell and Senior VP/General Counsel Semel, since their positions were redundant with Attachmate positions. Also, Chief Marketing Officer/Channel Chief Dragoon disclosed his departure publicly in a blog post.
- Somewhat surprising: The exits of Senior VPs/GMs O’Keefe and Ebzery. O’Keefe was closely involved with Novell’s services business and collaboration software efforts, particularly Novell GroupWise. Ebzery oversaw Novell’s identity management and security businesses.
- Big Numbers?: Also, a published report from Utah suggests roughly 800 Novell positions have been eliminated in recent weeks.
Channel Leaders?
According to the Novell and Attachmate web sites, neither company has issued any press releases since the Attachmate deal closed on April 27. But The VAR Guy expects some updates soon from Novell and Attachmate. In particular, the company is expected to reaffirm its channel commitments within a few weeks, perhaps even naming a specific person to lead Novell’s channel partner efforts.
In the meantime The VAR Guy is checking the status of additional Novell channel sources including:
- Global Director of Partner Marketing Dan Dufault: His LinkedIn bio continues to list current employment with Novell, but some recent recommendations from bosses and peers seem to indicate that Dufault may have exited Novell in recent weeks… The VAR Guy is double-checking Dufault’s status. Dufault joined Novell in March 2009 after holding channel positions at Panda Security, Kaspersky Lab, CollabNet and Progress Software.
- VP of Partner Marketing and Enablement Scott Lewis: He was quoted in a May 9, 2011, press release about two Novell channel partners merging. That quote — and Lewis’ LinkedIn bio — suggest he’s still with Novell. Lewis has held key Novell roles since 1994.
Worth Watching
The Attachmate-Novell deal arrived just as Novell was pushing into several new markets. In addition to its core businesses (SUSE Linux, identity and security management, workload management), Novell has been busy launching the Novell Cloud Security Service and the Novell Vibe enterprise social network platform.
Moreover, Novell has opened registration for BrainShare (Oct. 10-14, Salt Lake City, Utah). In a May 4 tweet, Novell indicated: “brainshare is full steam ahead. Looking forward to seeing everyone in October.”
In the meantime, The VAR Guy patiently awaits a channel update from Attachmate and Novell. Best guess: Novell will start chatting up the channel with the media before the end of May.
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I know the Novell guys spend $, and have spent money over the last 2+ years trying to promote their offerings, and it helps pay the bills for this site, as well as other parts of the computer business; but I am dismayed to see coverage of this crud, while seeing no good coverage of Google I/O or the Red Hat Summit. Two events from strong, growing, important companies for VAR’s.
My guess is that if you polled 100-1000 VAR’s and asked them how much they recommend or depend on Novell for their business, it would be less than 5%.
I think the VAR Guy is hipper than that. Get with the times young man !
Hi Bill,
The VAR Guy respects your feedback and your appreciates your readership. Our resident blogger covered Red Hat Summit last week. And if you look at each of our sites right now (The VAR Guy, MSPmentor and TalkinCloud) you’ll notice Google I/O coverage at the top of all three sites. Our resident blogger thinks Google Chromebook for Business — announced today and debuting June 15 — is a key service VARs have to track. In fact, The VAR Guy was in the audience this morning for Google I/O. And he’ll be meeting with the Google channel team on Friday…
-TVG
Bill, CRN recently polled a large number of partners with the result of naming Novell as the Channel Champion in the category of Network Security Software on behalf of our endpoint security, Security Information Event Monitoring and Access Management products. These were not partners that were known to be Novell Partners specifically but just a random sampling of VARs who recognized both the capabilities of our technology and the quality of our partner support.
You are certainly entitled to your opinion. I’d like it to be as fact based as possible. Here’s the CRN coverage: http://tinyurl.com/3moebsw
I’d like to see Novell push partners to move some of their traditional software like Zenworks or Groupwise. Are the mechanisms to reward VARs for doing that? I don’t know about anyone else, but I’d rather sell a lot for less than have those products continue to drift into oblivion. Is it possible to undercut exchange license pricing by 25% and at the same time give the VARs a larger cut of the profits, enough to make not pushing exchange worth their while. There would be an initial dip, but if they could gain momentum on this, there would be great potential on the back end. With local governments and public institutions cutting budgets, this is a great time to undercut the competition and start to rebuild the brand that many of the execs that you mentioned above, have badly damaged.
At this point, profit should be secondary to building market share.
Attachmate does not know ‘channel’ as it relates (related?) to Novell. I predict stormy waters ahead for any channel partner of the Novell ‘division’; you will soon be competing with your supplier.
Zzzzzzz….This topic (like Novell the company) is now dead. Can there be any question that the current Novell leadership team failed miserably? No product synergy, no channel pulse, nobody beside SAP, M$ buying subscriptions. This is a company that had a real-time Linux OS, a POS, a desktop and a server product in the Linux space and they could not even get their base distro off the ground. Seriously folks, if there is somebody out there (other than Novel-M$-VMware or SAP) with confidence in Novell’s going forward capabilities, could you please speak up?
It would take some incredible courage to place a bet on any Novell products at this point. None are market leaders so the alternative will always look better.
Bill B said it best several posts ago…Stick a fork in them, they are done!