Intranet Design News Brief

The start of an important turnaround for Novell and a potential shake-up of the intranet/extranet market were signalled by dual announcements from the company this week. First, 'The COMDEX IntraNet -- Novell Connecting Points' managed over a million messages per day for 220,000 COMDEX users, "with no system downtime," according to a release. Second, Novell's financials showed a return to profitability for the proprietary LAN king that many analysts, including some at this periodical, did not expect to see turn around.
In a related announcement at COMDEX Novell CEO Eric Schmidt said the company would return retire IntranetWare in favor of its long-standing NetWare brand. Novell's web-centric initiatives will be folded into Novonyx, the company's joint subsidiary with Netscape.

Undisputed scalability king

The intranet Novell touted as "the world's largest live, single-directory network," handled 5.6 million messages during COMDEX. The result of a collaboration between Novell, Compaq Computer, Bay Networks and ZD COMDEX & FORUMS, the massive network enabled the show's 220,000 attendees to stay connected to each other and their offices, while allowing them to enjoy a full schedule of event activities on the COMDEX Web site.
"'The COMDEX IntraNet -- Novell Connecting Points' was a huge success and provided valuable benefits to all attendees," said John Slitz, Novell's senior vice president of marketing. "By Wednesday morning we had sent 3.7 million messages and that didn't even begin to exhaust the system. The system was capable of handling much more traffic. Together, in partnership with Compaq, Bay Networks and ZD COMDEX & FORUMS, we have shown that it is possible to build a massive, reliable communications system for a show as large as a small city."

Grounds for hyperbole

"The COMDEX IntraNet -- Novell Connecting Points" provided users with a hands-on example of the performance, integration, scalability and reliability of solutions from Novell and its partners. Each of the system's six core Compaq Proliant servers running Novell applications supported 45,000 users.
Through GroupWise^®, Novell's advanced collaboration system, show organizers were able to send daily e-mail messages to the show's 220,000 attendees simultaneously, providing them with information on keynote sessions, instructions for using the system remote dial-in features and daily updates on "The COMDEX IntraNet -- Novell Connecting Points" throughout the show. These daily messages were processed quickly and efficiently, reaching the mass of attendees within 20 minutes.
Novell's BorderManager family of products, which managed attendees' access to the Internet, also demonstrated powerful performance by processing an average of 1.5 million http server requests and transmitting approximately six gigabytes of data per day.
"The COMDEX IntraNet -- Novell Connecting Points" was managed and administered from a central Network Operating Center in the main lobby of the Las Vegas Convention Center. It allowed all registered COMDEX attendees to send and retrieve e-mail, schedule appointments and access the Internet from four central locations on the show floor or from their hotel rooms through a browser during the November 17-21 show. Users were invited to register to win Compaq laptop computers and a Porsche Boxster -- Bill Pool of CSR Corporation in Las Vegas, Nevada was the winner of the sports car.

Users impressed

The 300 workstations, available to attendees during show hours, were in use nearly every minute the show was open. Users were invited to E-mail their feedback on all aspects of the show to event organizers and their messages show they found "The COMDEX IntraNet -- Novell Connecting Points" useful and convenient. Comments from users included: "Thank you for providing this service and coming up with what looks to be a killer application," and "Man, I want to thank you guys for the WONDERFUL service you are providing. This is the best advertising you could do."
"The system was an effective communication tool at all levels for attendees -- from scheduling business meetings and communicating with the office to contacting friends for social gatherings," said Bill Sell, show director for COMDEX. "Shortly after one attendee lost his Palm Pilot he got an E-mail from the person who found it -- the individual had looked him up in the GroupWise address book. They scheduled an appointment and the Palm Pilot was returned that day."

Ingredients for success

Novell Directory Services^TM (NDS^TM) gave "The COMDEX IntraNet -- Novell Connecting Points" administrators a single point of access for administering the network and adding user accounts. NDS provides a proven, scalable architecture for maintaining information on millions of objects within a single directory tree. NDS scalability and fault tolerance was recently validated by KeyLabs, Inc., an independent testing laboratory, at 2 million users and more than 14 million attributes without significant impact to network performance.
The sophisticated combination of software and network resources was powered by Compaq workstations and servers, with Bay Networks supplying reliable hubs and switches to ensure connection 24 hours a day. All of the Novell and partner products featured in "The COMDEX IntraNet -- Novell Connecting Points" are currently shipping.

Fruits of their labor

In a separate announcement on November 25, Novell (Nasdaq: NOVL) reported revenue of $269 million and net income of $7 million or $0.02 per share for its fourth fiscal quarter ended October 31, 1997. After two successive quarters of losses and restructuring in the third quarter, these results mark a return to profitability, the restoration of revenue to near second-quarter levels, and a $26-million decline in costs and expenses from the second quarter.
"I'm pleased to report that demand for our products came back from our entire distribution channel -- value added resellers, multi-product licensing programs, and original equipment manufacturers," said CEO Schmidt. "Fourth-quarter performance shows that the changes we've made in Novell's business are taking hold. We have also set a faster pace for product introductions and market initiatives."
"During the quarter, we delivered new Internet related products, including BorderManager and GroupWise 5.2, that are indicative of the changes we will make across our entire product line over the coming year. With the decisions we've made, fiscal 1998 will be a year of further investment. These changes are intended to build a strong foundation for our business and put Novell on a path to becoming a pure Internet/intranet leader."

SOURCE: PR Newswire, 24 Nov 1997

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