Novell Triples Their European Sales

Description: 

After opening a continental office in Great Brittan interest for the emerging Italian market and Italian distributors and specialty retailers grow. (See the graph of business volume 1984, 1985, 1986)

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Novell’s Management is engaging in some self-criticism, recognizing that they have so far reserved little attention for the Italian market, and has used this time when market growth has been seen,to announce, during a conference in Milano, the creation of their continental office in Great Britain. In addition, there are expansion plans in regard to the Italian sales force which will be coordinated by the new exclusive distributor Fast Italia. The London office will be under the direction of Peter Craine, vice president of the company, which will coordinate already existing sales offices, in Paris, Slough (England) and Dusseldorf. The Italian market, however, will remain under the responsibility of the German office. These events follow the recent restructuring of the parent company that has assimilated the activities of three American companies in the past twelve months: Santa Clara Systems, Soft-Craft, and Cxi. Santa Clara Systems is a hardware manufacturer that Novell had acquired at the end of last year, and that will take care of the manufacture of both the new Novell server SFT II and the interface card, Ethernet interface E-Net, which was only recently introduced to the national market. Soft-Craft, however, produces a software utility to simplify writing applications in a network environment (in particular, that of Novell networks). It was acquired at the beginning of 1987, and its flagship product is BTreve, is a software utility that takes care of indexing, searching, and projection of data managed on the network. Finally, there is Cxi, which, specializes in the production of software that aids with the interface for the PC-mainframe and the mainframe-mainframe; Cxi was acquired at the beginning of 1987. In Italy, its products are distributed by O.P.C of Milano and by Comteck of Rome. Cxi will be responsible for developing the necessary software needed to transfer data from a local network to the outside world. The Italian market will be serviced with ever increased attention. The Novell sales networks are growing faster in the European market, in terms, of percentage than in the U.S. (see graph). This has prompted management to reinforce the presence of the company on our continent with more advertising campaigns, with promotional initiatives, and courses for retailers and with the distribution of translated materials and software (translated are messages to the user and but not the commands). Until 1986, the producers of Lan had been engaged in competing for the U.S. market, seeking to ensure a future or this technology that analysts and users found hard to consider valid, said Jonathan Whiteley, present director of marketing for Novell, since 1983 after opening, the first European office of the company. Product distribution was left in the hands of distributors who often maintained distance from the parent house, fearing that market consolidation this would intervene on the market directly. Now the situation has changed, and the new Italian distributor Novell will retain the exclusive representation for several years.

Future plans include the creation of a network of specialized dealers belonging to Fast Italy. We are organizing a series of seminars to which we invited IBM dealerships. The course will last one day and those who participate will receive a free demo copy of the entry level NetWare system (the latest economic version of NetWare software) so that one can install it and try it in their own home, says Nico Rossi, director of the Fast Italia and former IBM project leader. At the same time, we will also be establishing contacts with Olivetti dealers. We have already selected twenty qualified dealers, and we anticipate that another thirty will soon be added. They will have to know all Novell products, in addition, to knowing how to solve various installation and configuration problems of the network, including bridges and gateway. There will also be a network of dealers Els NetWare who sell to the low profile market low-end users.. The market is divided, according to Rossi, in two general groups. The first group is made of small and medium-sized consumers who use the network for business applications, having an average of three or five active stations. The second group is the large audience that seriously needs to share office automation programs with several hundred personal computers. There is still a long way to go to make up for lost time.

The latest report of Intelligent Electronics of December 1986,regarding the Lan market, in fact, gave Novell a prominent position in Europe with a volume of affairs equal to 29.7% of the total market, but decidedly behind in Italy (with only 1.8%). The reasons for this situation are varied, not least of which was the choice of Olivetti to adapt 10 Net three years ago. In addition, 3Com the most direct competitor of Novell has already managed to win for the 3Plus network market diffusion equal to 13.8% of the total market

Roberto Mazzoni