Even Identity Can't Save Novell Now

Novell's Identity suite is arguably one of the best, with quite possibly the most number of production deployments in the market. It's provisioning solution is very mature, with Identity Manager 3 boasting "Designer", a tool allowing administrators to create almost the complete identity implementation graphically, and then drill down for configuration.
Furthermore, sales of Novell's Identity Manager are up 3% from last year. All that aside, Novell is in trouble.

Timothy Prickett Morgan states:

In the fourth quarter, Novell had software license sales of $46.1 million, down 41 percent from the year ago period. The bulk of this drop is attributed to a rapid decline in NetWare and its related Open Enterprise Server license sales, but Novell had issues in other areas. Linux is not growing fast enough to fill the NetWare hole, and neither are the company's identity management or server management product lines...You can also see why Novell bought SUSE three years ago. If it had not, Novell would be dead right now.

Hovsepian predicted lengthened stagnation in software sales in 2007, with the exception of Linux and Identity Management...but also stated a boost on '08 as a result of the Microsoft deal. Any way you slice it, Novell is not in good shape. Their stock price hit a 52-week low last week, as a result of their announcement regarding flat sales in '07. Identity brought in revenue of $23.8m in the quarter. Sales were up just $793,000, or 3.5%, to be worth 9.7% of overall revenue...apparently, Identity can't save Novell, but maybe Microsoft can.