Anyone looking for a quiet life would be well-advised not to set themselves up as Novell NetWare dealer, for the Provo, Utah-based company is, it appears, at the centre of yet another controversy surrounding distribution of its local area network operating system: several months ago, Computergram reported that Novell was introducing rigorous policing measures to prevent firms masquerading as value-added resellers from selling straight NetWare packages by themselves (CI No 1,348) – now, reports Computer Reseller News, the issue is end-users masquerading as resellers. Apparently, organisations that one would imagine were, if anything, end-users of NetWare – such as General Motors Corp, Harvard University and General Electric Co – have in fact been appointed Novell Authorised Resellers, and so can buy NetWare at the same prices as dealers attempting to make their living from selling the product. Last March, a subsidiary of Westinghouse Corp became a Novell Gold Authorised Reseller and starting selling NetWare to its parent company as well as to outside firms: Pittsburgh-based NetWare dealer Advanced Micro Technologies, which had previously counted Westinghouse as one of its clients, reckons that this will result in lost revenue of some $200,000 a year. As Advanced Micro Tech’s regional manager Pete Carlino commented, All they [Westinghouse] are doing is cutting the dealer out. Moreover, there have been other examples of consultancy firms setting themselves up as dealers and then selling NetWare at cost in order to get consulting work, while the University of Iowa’s computing centre has gained the Gold Authorised Reseller and has been selling NetWare throughout the university at cost plus a small markup to cover some of the overhead. The dealer community splits up into those, such as Advanced Micro, which have noticed a markedly harmful effect on business, and those that have long since stopped seeing NetWare as a potential source of large profits anyway: Novell, meanwhile, seems to be distancing itself from the dispute for the time being. National reseller manager Don Rainey denies that Novell is knowingly authorising users, claiming that the company sees Westinghouse and General Electric as genuinely entering into the reseller arena and does not feel it is its prerogative to tell them what business they can or cannot be in. He did, however, confirm that if we find out that someone has represented themselves as a reseller when in fact they are an end user, we would de-authorise them.
