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Novell beat Wall Street's estimates with a solid third quarter, but the real story is in its continued Linux growth. Net revenue rose to $245 million from $237 million in 2007, but Novell's third-quarter loss quadrupled to $15.1 million from $3.7 million in 2007.
Enterprise software vendor Novell (NASDAQ: NOVL) fell short of its guidance for the third fiscal quarter of 2010, missing its financial projections with both revenues and income declining.
Linux jobs in the United States are booming, up 6 percent since January, according to data from Dice.com. This will come as small consolation to Novell employees, however, which weathered another round of layoffs at the Waltham, Mass.-based company.
Novell's Linux business is keeping the company buoyant in trying economic times, the company's third-quarter earnings indicate. On Thursday, the software maker published its third-quarter results, which revealed that revenue from its Linux platform products had increased 22 percent, year-on-year, to US$38 million.
Yes, Novell has a ways to go to catch up with Red Hat, but with yet another strong quarter it's becoming increasingly clear that the enterprise Linux market is a two-horse race again. Importantly, Novell is competing much more strongly without backup from Microsoft.
Okay, the headline is a bit dramatic. But the Sun-MySQL business combo makes The VAR Guy wonder: Will Novell wake up and start buying open source application providers … or is Novell doomed to repeat the exact same mistakes it made in the 1990s? Alas, Novell in 2008 looks a lot like Novell from a decade ago. That’s not good. Here’s why.