Eighty-Eight Percent Of Platinum Resellers Say Selling Novell GroupWare Is Critical To Their Business Success

Novell's groupware products enable resellers to leverage investments in NetWare and current GroupWise systems

OREM, Utah -- June 12, 1995 -- Novell®, Inc. today announced that its resellers and channel partners are enthused by the sales of the GroupWise electronic messaging system to date and the opportunities provided by Novell's future groupware offerings. According to the Novell Channel National Reseller Study, conducted and compiled by Dan Jones and Associates, an independent research firm based in Salt Lake City, 88 percent of Novell's Platinum resellers say selling Novell's groupware products is critical to their business success.

Ninety percent of Novell's Platinum resellers and more than 3,000 of Novell's channel partners have been briefed on the company's long-term groupware strategy, including GroupWise XTD, the first product from Novell based on its Collaborative Computing Environment, and are beginning the process required to sell the new technologies.

"Novell's GroupWare products are a natural extension of the business opportunity for the channel," said Linda Myers-Tierney, director, electronic messaging technologies, International Data Corp. "By embracing Novell's GroupWare products, the channel leverages their NetWare expertise and builds their business momentum."

The foundation of Novell's GroupWise XTD product family resides in products that are available and market-tested today: GroupWise, InForms, SoftSolutions and Collabra Share for GroupWise.

GroupWise XTD will compete directly with Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes v. 4 and will provide Novell with significant competitive advantages. GroupWise XTD is built upon proven technology; will lower the total cost of ownership through tight integration with NetWare Directory Services (NDS) and NetWare Administrator; supports industry standards such as MAPI 1.0 and the Open Document Management API (ODMA); and will be a full protocol-based client/server implementation, making it the best possible team-computing solution for NetWare users.

"Our clients feel that GroupWise will work more smoothly than other messaging systems because of its NetWare backbone," said John Heckman, a consultant at Kraft, Kennedy and Lesser, a systems integrator specializing in the legal market. "Because of the Universal In Box that supports features like scheduling, people see GroupWise as the closest thing to meeting all their team-computing needs in one package. Product suites are a hot item today and Novell's offering is like a 'mega-suite' because it includes all the messaging features plus the network as well."

"We have had an outstanding response from our channel partners regarding our current product set as well as GroupWise XTD," said Stewart Nelson, vice president and general manager, Novell GroupWare Division. "They are very enthusiastic about Novell's long-term groupware strategy because the tight integration with NetWare provides strengths our competitors can't touch. Both channel partners' and end users' investments in the current version of GroupWise, as well as NetWare, are fully leveraged and protected with GroupWise XTD."

By providing a new set of value-added services, GroupWise XTD will enable Novell's channel partners to offer more value to their customers. GroupWise XTD provides an open development environment for customizing or developing add-on groupware applications. Channel partners and third-party ISVs can offer GroupWise enhancements as another means of providing value to their customers. In addition, the integration of SoftSolutions, InForms and Collabra Share for GroupWise provides partners with additional opportunities to provide services for business process reengineering, systems consulting and implementation.

"Novell is really giving us a great set of products with GroupWise XTD," said Jerry Young, president, The LAN Company. "The team computing capabilities added by Collabra Share for GroupWise and the workflow features are very appealing to our clients, who generally work in collaborative environments with many documents to manage. The tight integration with NetWare makes it much easier to manage the system and lowers maintenance costs. We absolutely feel the benefits added by GroupWise will help drive the migration of NetWare users to version 4 by providing the real incentives and motivation they have been waiting for. The ability to control the desktop with one set of products is very powerful and gives Novell a great opportunity in the market."