Novell purchase rumors abound

Novell is understandably quiet on the potential sale of the company. As they should be for legal reasons.  Messaging Architects had put out an invitation for a webinar to discuss the sale further, but has since retracted that invite after talking to their advisers - wise move.

Anyway, the scuttle-butt now is that VMWare wants to purchase up the Linux portion of the business and everyone's chiming in on the good/bad/ugly of the deal.  And the reporters keep mentioning Attachmate to pick up the NetWare side of the business.  Apparently the reporters don't realize that Novell is FAR more than NetWare, and that NetWare end of lifed this year.  They have yet to discuss GroupWise, Teaming, Conferencing, Pulse, IDM, eDirectory, ZENworks, Access Manager, SecureLogin, Sentinel, Storage Manager, and all the new cloud offerings.  And anything else I missed.  Perhaps that's why people are stressed out over the sale.

I still don't understand all the kafuffle about the potential sale.  First, it's a potential sale.  No one who would know anything has said "boo" (it's close to Halloween, gimme a break!) about it.  And secondly, how many of you weren't around for the mid-80's massive M&A in all industries?  Maybe I'm just showing my age, but really, IT changes all the time.  IBM used to be the "big boys", then Apple was the rage, Microsoft took over PCs, Novell started LANs, and now Apple's popular once more.  It's all a big circle; centralized IT, decentralized IT, centralized IT (via cloud services)...it'll come around again.  New players will pop up...heck will Google even be around as Google in 10-20 years?  Who knows?  That's part of the thrill of being in IT.

Whether Novell as a brand and a company survives is yet to be seen, but there's been a lot of big players before who've lost out and the sky still hasn't fallen.

So take some advice from my favorite professor, Dr. Don Medley (who learned COBOL direct from Grace Hopper).  Paraphrased: you're in an industry that not only requires, but demands life-long learning, pay attention, keep your skills current and sharp, and go after every certification that you can - the paper proves you know the topic at some level.  Stay marketable!

Now, back to stick my head in my Active Directory book and hope I don't get a headache while I work at staying marketable.  If I only learned one lesson from my college days it's to "Pay attention to Dr. Medley - always!".