Some thoughts on Novell BrainShare

I spent Monday at BrainShare, Novell’s annual conference held in Salt Lake City each year, although the show took a hiatus in 2009 for reasons that were primarily economic – both for Novell and for its customers.

Although the show was fairly well attended, including a mostly packed keynote on Monday morning, the show was clearly much smaller than in past years. For example, the large dining hall that served breakfast and lunch each day was replaced by multiple food stations on the show floor itself. While there were a decent number of exhibitors on floor, there were fewer than in past years. Other than Novell itself, GWAVA and IBM were two of the larger exhibitors.

On a positive note, the keynote on Monday morning presented some very interesting content (although I got there late and missed the opening portion), including a good demonstration of Novell Pulse – Novell’s real-time collaboration tool – soon to be released to attendees of BrainShare for use with up to five of their friends. Also shown was a very nifty demo of ZENworks used to demonstrate the migration of a user from Windows XP to Windows 7 – along with their data – in a matter of just a few minutes. I also attended a quite interesting session on the use of virtualization for disaster recovery using VMware ESX.

BrainShare, as always, is an interesting and informative show. This year, however, it was made all the more interesting by the undercurrent of Novell’s potential acquisition. In early March, Elliott Associates, a hedge fund operator, made a roughly $2 billion bid for the company that the company turned down on March 21. It’s likely that Elliott Associates will up its bid or Novell will be acquired by another company – one person in the know with whom I spoke on Monday afternoon is surprised that Citrix has not made a public bid for Novell given the synergy and existing partnership between the companies. Another alternative is the parceling out of the more valuable bits of Novell to various suitors. GroupWise, for example, is still making money (albeit not acquiring customers in huge numbers) and might be acquired by a company that already focuses heavily on the GroupWise space (a couple of them come to mind). Whatever, Novell does, it will likely be sooner rather than later given the company’s last year-and-a-half of declining revenue.

Personally, I am impressed by a lot of Novell’s technology and hope to see its continued development. GroupWise, for example, still has many loyal users and is a very solid messaging and collaboration platform; Novell Pulse is an interesting technology for real-time collaboration, and so forth. It will be interesting to see what happens with the company over the next few months.