Novell Inc’s long-awaited and much-delayed Processor Independent NetWare, PIN, is not looking as processor-independent as it once was – following Hewlett-Packard Co pulling the plug on its Precision Architecture RISC development plans a while ago, Digital Equipment Corp has now abandoned its NetWare-on-Alpha plans. Indeed, Novell now has only two partners left – Sun Microsystems Inc and Apple Computer Inc – and even Sun has been expressing discontent at the time it is taking to bring the product to market. DEC said the main reason for the withdrawal was the delay in shipping the product: originally due for launch last year, it was then to have been announced simultaneously with NetWare 4.1 in January, but will not now appear until the summer at the earliest, although beta implementations could surface at a springtime developers’ conference. This, combined with the fact that DEC already provides NetWare integration for its Alpha AXP chip via its PathWorks product family, led to the decision. Susan Hanson, Novell’s Processor-Independent NetWare product manager, said development work will continue regardless. She was unaware that discussions with DEC had been terminated, but on the subject of Hewlett-Packard’s withdrawal, she admitted that it hurt us in that we changed reference platforms. Novell is now working with Apple to use the Common Hardware Reference Platform PowerPC standard as its reference system. For its part, Sun is also miffed at the time that development work is taking: Ken Jochims, product marketing manager for third party OEM customers at Sun’s Sparc Technology Business unit, commented, At the end of ’93 we delivered all of the software we needed. Since then they have had all the code they needed, and have failed to deliver. Sun is not, however, going to pull out of the project, but says the Sparc implementation will be all Novell’s work and if it ever sees the light of day it could be put to some use if it matches up to some of the original features promised. Novell’s Ms Hanson said the company has already demonstrated a prototype version of the product, and that there will be heavy emphasis on it at Novell’s forthcoming development fair in March. But pretty much all that is left now is Processor-Independent NetWare for the PowerPC.
