Novell sacks more staff, cuts benefits

By Sam Varghese
Friday, 06 November 2009 14:20

Opinion and Analysis

Mixed-source technology company Novell has sacked between three and four percent of its staff in layoffs that could well be linked to another bad quarter.


Well-known open source blogger Matt Asay reports that between 100 and 130 staff have been shown the door.

The layoffs come a month ahead of the announcement, on December 3, of the company's results for the fourth fiscal quarter and the full fiscal year 2009.

The remaining employees will be affected too, with the company announcing that it would be suspending matching contributions to their 401(k) pension plans.

Novell gives its total number of staff as 3900 while other sources give a lower figure of 3700, Novell is headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts, with key facilities in Provo, Utah, and Nuremberg, Germany.

In September, Novell announced that it would be cutting 10 percent of its British distributors.

About half the company's staff are located outside the US; it has over 100 offices worldwide with regional and development offices in Bangalore, Beijing, Bracknell (UK), Paris, Prague, Sao Paulo, Sydney and Tokyo.

Three years ago, to the day, Novell signed a patent indemnification deal with Microsoft which was widely viewed as a sellout by the free and open source software community.

Though Novell has reported some better quarters for its GNU/Linux business since then - mainly because of the sale of SUSE Linux coupons through Microsoft - it has not been able to put together a coherent strategy to compete with market-leading GNU/Linux company, Red Hat.

In the early 1980s, Novell was the dominant player in the PC networking business through its Netware product which was developed by Dale Neibaur, Kyle Powell and Drew Major who were contractors working for the company.

Since then, Novell's fortunes have gone steadily downhill .