Both sides of BrainShare

by Dave Kearns

April 19, 2001 —

My mailbox has been filling up with inquiries from readers who see some sort of dichotomy between my review of BrainShare in last week's newsletter and the Network World stories about BrainShare written by Senior Editor Deni Connor.

In fact, there is no dichotomy -- it’s simply that Deni and I talked to different people.

She was concentrating on the "Executive VIP" group (the CxOs, as they're now called), while I was in the trenches with the network managers.

In particular, my readers were somewhat irate at Deni's reporting that customers thought Novell should "[d]istance itself from its legacy operating system and concentrate on applications that use the directory to solve business problems." A little clarification is in order, I think.

These customers are not calling on Novell to abandon NetWare, but to de-emphasize its place in the Novell hierarchy of products and services and realize that directory-enabled applications and services are the solutions to today's and tomorrow's computing problems.

It’s no longer that important that we learn to share files and printers. What is important is that we share these resources (and others) across multiple platforms as efficiently as possible, leveraging the power of the directory to do the grunt work of maintaining users' digital personas, preferences and privileges. This is simply recognition of where the world is going.

None of that means that NetWare will be going away - or should. It’s still the best platform for the best directory service available, and that won't change in the near future. So call off the dogs. Network World is speaking with one voice about Novell, telling one story - we're just doing it from more than one perspective.

Network World