Darrell Miller, Novell Inc’s executive vice-president for corporate marketing and strategy was talking anarchy last week. Waving an HP 100LX handheld under the noses of breakfasting journos he explained that many of Novell’s acquisitions and partnerships over the past four years have aimed at getting Personal Digital Assistants tied into corporate networks. In two or three years from now we think there will be another wave of anarchy with people buying these things – if they can be connected back to the local network. Another wave? Well the first was during the 1980s when personal computers invaded the cosy data processing world – now Miller believes that large corporates face a similar upheaval, thanks to the palm-top – or nomadic computing as he terms it. Miller’s story runs so: over the past few years he says, Novell has been visited by a stream of manufacturers of handhelds seeking a solution to the same problem, namely we are not selling many of these things and we won’t sell many until they can get hooked up into the local network – can you help us? In all Miller says that Novell is now talking to around 20 such manufacturers, many of them Japanese and all of them with the similar aim. Communicating is not the only issue – wireless local networks and satellite paging, though in their infancy, show that it can be done.
Battery
More pressing is the need for a client-server architecture that enables the mobile to make intelligent use of the processing power back at base. One issue is boring old battery technology it hasn’t improved much in 20 years – nay, 40 years, and the kind of processing power being crammed into the new generation of handhelds stretches the technology – some users report that the Apple Computer Inc’s Newton’s four AAA batteries for example only last around 10 to 15 hours in normal use. By moving some of the data manipulation onto a separate server Novell and its partners hope to enable the mobile device to expend its resources on things like the graphical user interface, and the networking, with the server taking a lot of the strain – it should be possible, for example for the server to handle handwriting recognition on pen-based systems. Certainly fax and mail gateways could sit there. This kind of architecture frees some of the constraints that currently bind would-be nomads and opens the way to more sophisticated application’s says Miller. He sketches out a diagram with the back-end server connecting to all manner of services running on NetWare including voice to text recognition, fax, image processing, databases and transaction processing engines. In between these services and the palm-top sits the server – at the moment a box with no name, though Miller calls the thing the personal server. This is the box that will host the applications – that will pull together the disparate information and formulate the responses to the PDA over the network. It is part communications node and part application server and at the moment the prototype is running UnixWare. Novell put its wallet to work in order to build the system. The practicabilities are not trivial – at the simplest level is the problem of keeping remote and centralised copies of databases consistent, one reason for Novell’s decision to buy International Business Software of Sunnyvale California for $5.2m back in April 1992. IBS specialises in building ‘virtual file systems’ where multiple copies of a file are held in various places and need to be synchronised. Similarly, the way that the Miller tells it, the stake in workflow specialist Beyond Software Inc in January 1993 was largely driven by the drive to support handhelds. But perhaps most surprising is the extent to which Novell’s much-vaunted AppWare strategy was driven by the same requirement.
By Chris Rose
AppWare is Novell’s stab at an environment for building machine-independent, distributed applications (CI No 2,200). It is rich in code from recent acquisitions and equity partners: at its heart is a visual programming environment from Serius Corp Novell’s most recent ac
quisition. Its second most recent acquisition, Software Transformation Inc is providing the technology to ensure that AppWare runs across multiple hardware and software systems. Finally Novell took around a 20% stake in Hyperdesk Corp of Westborough, Massachusetts in January 1993 at that time Hyperdesk had the only cross-system implementation of the Object Management Group’s CORBA Common Object Request Broker. Miller says candidly that AppWare will initially be deployed on fixed networks, but that it is being developed specifically with an eye towards coping with the most complex possible case, which for developers is nomadic computing. This complexity is inherent in Novell’s nomadic dream: to off-load intelligence, to pull together the services requires the most radical client-server, distributed, object-oriented systems. Writing that kind of application is really tough says Miller, implying that the only practical way to build them is to use a visual development environment where links between modules are graphically constructed. The prototype personal server running in Miller’s office does not rely on AppWare, but the experience of having the office diary automatically downloaded to his handheld twice a day was addictive – I got greedy he says, and now the company’s sales figure are downloaded too. When Miller is on his home campus he relies on a PCMCIA card to keep him connected to the local network. Off campus and a satellite paging card is slotted in instead, at other Novell offices he uses a simple PCMCIA local network adaptor card. Even this relatively simple task involves some problems – the diaries in the office hold data in a format inimical to the Hewlett-Packard handheld, for example so a programme running in he server needs to handle the conversion. In addition, the satellite paging service handles only 256 byte messages, so the whole lot needs to be chopped up for transmission. As for when the work will turn into a product – that is more problematic. It is not even certain yet that a shrink-wrapped Personal Server for linking nomads to the office will appear, however Miller’s guess is that over the next two years the existing offerings will evolve into a marketable product that will contain a number of standard services. Three, in particular, are likely to be included: disconnected services, transaction processing services and directory services. We have already mentioned the first of these in passing: conventional networks hate connections that break all the time, and disconnected services will set out to solve that.
Tuxedo
It is likely to include the International Business Software virtual file system, as well as its new NetWare Link Support Protocol wide area routing protocol and RSA encryption and authentication. The transaction processing service is likely to be based on Tuxedo technology and with the message handling courtesy of NetWare. Meanwhile at the client end the 20 or so nomadic computer manufacturers who came cap in hand to the networking company are being shown Personal NetWare. Personal NetWare wins the award for being the most nebulous of Novell products, due to its as status as an umbrella term rather than a product its own right. At its heart, it is simply a universal requester – a NetWare client that can be built into any underlying operating system. On top sits a variety of Virtual Loadable Modules which can be loaded on demand. Each provides a discrete function, which might be printing or network management or messaging or peer-to-peer capabilities. In the nomad’s case one of the most important Virtual Modules will be the one that keeps the nomadic and office-based databases synchronised. Will all this work be worth it? Miller thinks so, saying that it will be the large corporates that will have to cope with it first. Sales of desktop machines are growing at around 10% he says; nomadic devices, by contrast are growing at 40% and Novell has them pegged as an advantage in the NetWare-NT war. Miller says that no other company and certainly not Microsoft Corp, has made the inve
stment in the glue necessary to pull the portables into the corporate network. Anarchy would be good news for NetWare.
