Novell

By CIO New Zealand staff | Monday, January 11 2010

Novell is concentrating its energy on integrating mixed IT environments this year and has put a lot of time and development focus into cloud technology, as well as traditional datacentres.

Global HQ: Waltham, Massachusetts, US
Website: www.novell.com
Global leader: Ronald Hovsepian, president and CEO
Local leader: Maarten Koster, president and GM, Asia-Pacific
Core activity: Datacentres, security and identity, resource management, workgroup and desktop business services
Revenue: US$956.5 million (FY07-08 ended October 31)
Key customers: NZ Ministry of Education, NZ Supercomputing Centre, Public Trust, HSBC, Peugeot Citroën, Siemens, Fujitsu, Gulfstream Aerospace, Casio, Audi, BMW
Employees: 3900

Novell is concentrating its energy on integrating mixed IT environments this year and has put a lot of time and development focus into cloud technology, as well as traditional datacentres.

The company had a bit of an up-again, down-again time in court in 2009, first winning a copyright ruling regarding the company’s seemingly never-ending court proceedings with SCO Group over Unix, then losing the ruling on appeal. Meanwhile, the SUSE Linux operating system at the centre of its Unix wrangling increased revenue by 22 percent year-on-year.

One nifty product the company launched was a new kit called MonoTouch, which allows developers to create an application using .Net and then automatically convert it into a native iPhone-compatible app. The new technology could have positive implications for the propagation and utility of the iPhone as an enterprise device. Rachael Bolton