• Recommend:
• 0 Comments

NT Beating NetWare in Battle for New Users, Study Says

Novell still has major share of product shipments.

By Marc Ferranti, PCWorld   

Sales of new licenses for NT Server grew by about 85 percent in 1996, outselling new units of NetWare 4.x by more than two times, according to IDC. A breakdown in terms of revenue was not available.

However, taking into account upgrade sales to existing customers, Novell is still the network operating system leader, with a 37 percent share of total worldwide network operating systems licenses sold in 1996, down from 41 percent in 1995, according to IDC. NT%squots total market share of server licenses sold was 27 percent, up from 17 percent in 1995.

IDC bases its numbers mainly on reports from vendors, though it cross-checks the vendor figures against surveys of users, IDC officials said. Both Novell and Microsoft are major customers of IDC%squots market research reports and services, IDC officials said.

In a press release issued Monday, Microsoft quoted a subset of the IDC figures, mentioning sales to new users, but leaving out the figures regarding upgrades to existing customers.

Novell countered today with its own press release, also citing IDC figures. However, Novell cited figures relating to total sales of NetWare licenses, including upgrades.

However, the trend in favor of Microsoft among new users is undeniable, said IDC analysts.

%dquotNovell still has the leading market share though Microsoft has obviously gained a lot,%dquot said Lee Doyle, vice president at IDC in Framingham, Massachusetts. %dquotIt is probably inevitable that they [Microsoft] will take the leadership in terms of absolute market share, but that doesn%squott mean they%squotll have the same dominance in servers as they have on the client side,%dquot Doyle said.

If Novell continues to ship good products it is likely that it will hold on to the majority of its current customer base, Doyle said. %dquotBut Novell needs to be a significant player in the Internet; they have some good products but not the visibility, even though they have the most widely deployed directory of anyone out there,%dquot he said.

The appointment last week of Eric Schmidt as Novell chairman and CEO was a good move in this respect, said Doyle. As chief technology officer for Sun Microsystems and a major industry figure in efforts to market Java, Schmidt gained a very high profile in the Internet community, Doyle noted.