Novell's Vibe Cloud floats away
Farewell, web-collaboration service – we hardly knew ye
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After floating it around the market for only three months, Novell has decided to evaporate its Vibe Cloud web-based "social collaboration platform for the enterprise".
The decision to decommission the Vibe Cloud service as of September 30 was announced by Novell's new president and GM Bob Flynn in a Thursday post on the company blog, optimistically entitled "Defining the Next Chapter of Novell: Focus and Commitment".
According to Infoworld, Vibe Cloud had a mere 50 customers, all of them using the stripped-down free version – stats that must have made the decision a relatively easy one for Flynn, who has been Novell's headman for even less time than Vibe Cloud has been a product offering: Vibe Cloud came out of beta on April 4 – just over two weeks before Novell's acquisition by Attachmate was completed – and Flynn's appointment was announced on May 18.
The Vibe platform, however, isn't disappearing from Novell's offerings – it's merely leaving the cloudy heights of offsite service. Vibe OnPrem, the company's enterprise-hosted team collaboration service will be beefed up and incorporated into their GroupWise messaging, calendar, and collaboration suite, which Infoworld notes has around 30 million end users.
Flynn promises that more will be revealed about the Novell's plans for these and other products at the company's BrainShare customer and partner confab, to be held on October 10-14 in the marvelously named Salt Palace Convention Center in Salt Lake City, Utah. ®
COMMENTS
A Good Decision
Vibe Cloud was an ugly red headed stepchild compared to the much more useful Vibe OnPrem product.
It's been a long time since a Novell product has captured the imagination of my Management but OnPrem did that in spades.
@James 100 - Netware hasn't been discontinued. OES on Linux brings all the good stuff from Netware, dumps the useless rubbish, and adds a ton of nice new features, some of which are really innovative - eg. MS & Citrix supported AD running on Linux that can run faster with more users than AD on Windows. What's not to like?
I won't argue that Groupwise needs attention (and it seems to be getting it), but I think the biggest problem for Novell sites is too many of them have sat on their laurels and not explored the new products Novell have been pumping out for the last few years.
I have no sympathy for anyone moaning about Groupwise performance when they're still running Netware - Groupwise on Linux is a dozen times faster.
Can't really put all the blame for that on Novell, and even if you do, the new leadership seem to have a good plan and the will to execute it.
Bit of clarification
Not sure where you got your usage figures, but I believe there were 50 commercial users, but something like 17,000 individual users for Vibe Cloud.
Either way, it sounds like Novell Vibe will continue forward and gradually bring the best features from Vibe Cloud into the product. This model of launching "beta" versions and seeing how people use them has a lot of precedent -- Google does it all the time.
I have used both versions and they both have some features I really liked. Looking forward to what they'll do with it next.
Novell's Next Chapter
11? Or will they skip straight to 13 this time?
They had a fantastic file server product in the 80s, but then sat on their laurels through the late 90s while Microsoft slowly ate their market share. Now they've discontinued their only big success story, what's left - legacy installations sustained, for now, by inertia? How many 'greenfield' sites do you think would seriously consider setting up a new Netware installation, and how many existing Netware shops are slowly - or quickly - winding down that side?
We're finally ditching Groupwise next month; I'll drink to that, and look forward to something less geriatric taking over the file/print handling too.
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