Novell NetWare
In Utah in 1979, four men embarked on a computing adventure without imagining they would revolutionize how machines communicate with each other. Dennis Fairclough, George Canova, Darin Field, and Jack Davis founded Novell Data Systems Inc. in Orem, far from Silicon Valley's laboratories. Their financial backer, Safeguard Scientifics, bet on this team to develop CP/M-based systems. The early steps were arduous: competition was fierce and sales struggled to take off.
The idea that would change everything emerged almost out of necessity. Why not connect these microcomputers proliferating in offices, rather than persist in a saturated market? This insight didn't come from nowhere. Several team members, including newcomers Drew Major, Dale Neibaur, and Kyle Powell, had worked on government contracts that familiarized them with ARPANET. They understood the power of networks before the general public discovered the Internet.
The road remained fraught with obstacles. Safeguard's board of directors nearly shut down the operation, but the company secured new financing at the last minute. Raymond Noorda arrived as CEO in 1983. This experienced businessman renamed the company Novell Inc. and bet everything on NetWare, their network operating system.
NetWare's approach stood out from what existed at the time. A machine designated as the dedicated network server, orchestrating access to hard drives and printers shared by other workstations. The star topology relied on twisted-pair cabling, a more reliable technology than competing solutions. NetWare, initially called ShareNet, came in two versions: one for Intel 8086 processors, the other for Motorola.
The 1980s saw personal computing massively installed in businesses. NetWare rode this wave and became the reference for departmental local area networks. In 1986, Novell expanded its territory with GroupWise, a messaging and collaborative tools solution long before Microsoft Office 365.
The early 1990s established NetWare's dominance: nearly 70% of the network operating system market belonged to it. Version 4 radically transformed the system's capabilities. Novell Directory Services revolutionized administration by consolidating multiple servers under unified management. The NetWare Administrator interface simplified network administrators' daily work. NetWare's file and print services had no equivalent at the time.
Everything shifted with the Internet explosion in the late 1990s. Local area networks interconnected, extending beyond department boundaries to embrace entire buildings, then continents via WAN connections. Novell responded with intraNetWare, which included an improved version of NetWare 4.11. This version facilitated installation, boosted performance, and introduced the first 32-bit client for Windows.
IntraNetWare adapted to new uses with an IPX/IP gateway for connecting workstations to IP networks, an integrated web server, native support for DHCP and DNS. NetWare still excelled in its area of expertise, but companies criticized its weakness in hosting business applications.
Microsoft chose this moment to strike hard. The Redmond firm ended its partnership with 3Com and developed Windows NT with integrated network features. This vertical integration strategy directly threatened Novell's model. Facing this offensive, the Utah company made a strategic mistake: it acquired WordPerfect and Quattro Pro to confront Microsoft on its own turf. This diversification scattered efforts and resources across markets that Novell poorly understood.
Microsoft played a war of attrition. Its considerable financial resources gave it the means to persevere until Windows NT prevailed over NetWare. Novell, engaged on too many fronts, had to divest its acquisitions and constantly revise its strategy without regaining its former glory.
The turn of the 2000s saw Novell embrace open-source philosophy. NetWare was reborn as Open Enterprise Server (OES), available in two versions: one retained the traditional NetWare kernel to ensure compatibility, the other relied on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. NetWare 6.5 marked the end of an era: it corresponded to OES-NetWare Kernel with Support Pack 2. From then on, Novell recommended running NetWare in a Xen virtual machine hosted on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.
This thirty-year trajectory tells the story of enterprise networking evolution. NetWare was born from an insight: connecting isolated machines to multiply their utility. It accompanied organizations' computerization, transforming standalone workstations into collaborative networks. Its fall against Microsoft illustrates the computing industry's brutality, where dominant position guarantees nothing against a determined and well-funded competitor. The final conversion to open source testifies to the sector's transformations, where openness and interoperability have also become imperatives for survival.