3/16/2005 -- Open Enterprise Server (OES) is the latest product to be released from Novell. While it’s hard to categorize it as an operating system (OS), network operating system (NOS) or application, I truly admire the concept behind it. At the same time, I can’t help but wonder if the decision makers with their companies’ pocketbooks will understand its significance enough to spend money on it. For OES to be successful, education and marketing have to go hand-in-hand.

As everyone now knows, Novell decided a while back that they wanted to change direction from being a proprietary NOS company and become a Linux company. Their proprietary NOS, NetWare, has seen its market share eaten up by competitors, and the latest version of it, NetWare 6.5, embraced many open-source technologies and concepts to compete.

Enter OES. It runs on top of another OS and ports the features of NetWare, and/or a few new ones, to that OS. The OS can be NetWare (6.5, hopefully), or Linux (SuSE 9, hopefully). Because it runs on top of another OS, I’m not sure you can technically call it an OS in its own right. This, however, is where the beauty—and the confusion—comes into the picture.

If my shop is already running NetWare 6.5, I can add OES on top of the servers that are there and enjoy newer versions of many of the utilities I already have, integrating more Web-based interfaces and open-source solutions. So, I stand to gain by adopting OES, but the gain is an evolutionary one, not a revolutionary one.

If my shop is a Linux shop, however, then a whole new picture takes shape. I can add OES and suddenly I have access, in Linux, to most of the utilities that exist in NetWare. These include:

1. Administrative Services: iManager and Patch Management.
2. Directory Services: eDirectory, an object-oriented, hierarchical, distributed and replicated database.
3. End User Services: Virtual Office lets administrators create personalized user portals that are used by users to access their data and applications from a single Web site.
4. High Availability Services: Novell Cluster Services (NCS) is tightly integrated with eDirectory. It allows you to configure a number of NetWare servers as a single multimode cluster with support for both shared SCSI devices and Fiber Channel SANs.
5. Print Services: Novell iPrint is the latest tool for printing; it allows mobile users to print from remote locations to networked print devices through the Internet, through an integration of Novell Distributed Print Services (NDPS) and the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) service.
6. Storage Services: Novell Storage Services (NSS) and iFolder.

Thus, the Linux shop has much to gain from adopting OES if they interact on a regular basis with other departments that have standardized on NetWare, or if they want to add these features to their administrative environment.

The concept is a great one. An administrator should be able to administer a network just as he/she did before—using the same tools and rules—regardless of the operating system that is in use. With OES, Novell provides a bridge between proprietary and open source: “dual source,” if you will. By supporting both platforms, Novell and customers are embracing a future that supports both closed source and open source solutions, which has the potential to offer unprecedented synergy. The keyword here is “choice.”

So, if it’s such a great idea, why do I think that both marketing and education are critical to its success?

1. Novell’s OES is not the first of its kind. The idea of a universal interface is what propelled Java to the success it enjoyed. Seven or eight years ago, Lucent had a similar idea, which they called Inferno. Whereas Java became a sensation, Inferno became a footnote. It can be argued that their success and failure was because Sun was behind one and Lucent another; but I also maintain that the fact that no one understood what Inferno was hurt it as much as anything else.
2. An administrator can’t get completely away from the operating system. The means by which you tweak OES (or other applications, for that matter) will always differ due to the underlying OS. If you are running SuSE, for example, you have the simplicity of YaST (Yet Another Setup Tool); if you’re not running SuSE, you don’t. Coupled with this, from a purely emotional point of view, many administrators fear that if they don’t have the operating system to contend with, then they’ve been turned into users and a great many administrators don’t want to be users.
3. In addition to there being differences in operating systems before adding OES, there will also always be differences in OES based on the operating system it’s running on top of. In other words, not all of OES’ features can run on both operating systems. The following services and utilities are available in OES only when it is installed on Linux: Linux User Management, NCP Server, Open WBEM CIMOM, Package Management and Samba. The following services and utilities are available in OES only when it is installed on NetWare: Audit, ConsoleOne, DFS, Native File Access and Nterprise Branch Office.

I’m not saying that OES won’t succeed. In fact, I truly hope it does. For it to do so, however, there must be a shift in the paradigm for administrators, and it will take both education and effective/targeted advertising for the market to respond.