Novell and Markus Rex: Reinventing An Empire

“In the 1990’s Novell’s NetWare dominated the networking
industry with over 70% of the global market share. Their technical
certifications were the industry’s gold standard and offered titles
such as Certified Novell Engineer, Master Certified Novell
Engineer, Certified Novell Directory Engineer, and Novell
Administrator. Just ten years later, the networking giant of the
20th century would find itself in a struggle to maintain relevance
in the new millennium. The solution came as a change in strategy
that would shift the company’s focus from networking technologies
to low level software and a new venture into an open sourced
operating system of their own.

“Microsoft’s networking technologies had become increasingly
prevalent with the successes of the NT platform and a shift in
development from its more desktop centric operating systems to the
more enterprise oriented Windows 2000. With the battle for
networking technology all but lost, Novell fell back on its low
level software development and in an effort to compete with
Microsoft’s Office suite, acquired WordPerfect. In 1996, Novell
ended up selling WordPerfect to Corel when it couldn’t gain market
share. Ironically, it would be the acquisition of German based SuSe
Linux in 2004 that would put Novell back in the ring with the
operating system that had nearly wiped them out a few years
prior.”

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