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By Suzanna Kerridge, 2 September 1998 17:54

NEWS The launch of Novell's NetWare 5 yesterday will not be the Windows NT killer the company hopes, according to a leading industry analyst. Ashim Pal, analyst at The Meta Group, said: "Novell has made a series of small, medium and enterprise mistakes which has collectively bought it to a position of technical dead end. You don't fix a perception like that with one product." Michael Simpson, director of marketing for Novell's network services division, said the network management system was the antidote to the pain felt by those deploying Windows NT. Pal disagreed, claiming the much touted pure IP network feature was little more than a check list item that would not win "millions more seats". He said there were significant improvements to product features including clustering, rapid volume mounting and hot plug PCI. Pal said the improvements would "cement existing customers" and represented a starting point for long term plans. "It has potential and promise, but it needs to execute other things before I could recommend it to a client as a mainstream risk. I'd have a job justifying going with Novell's Web strategy," he said. Camiel Camps, senior research analyst at IDC, said: "It's a check list item in the sense that companies are looking to the market for IP protocol. It is aimed at companies wanting to migrate to IP but it still supports IPX." But Camps agreed NetWare 5 did not have long term future in trying to grab market share from Windows NT. "For the time being it will be a main competitor. Windows NT 5 has been announced a couple of times but is still delayed, so at this point NetWare has the advantage. But once companies start deploying NT 5 it will continue to gain market share," said Camps.