Right now Novell has a lot to clarify to its shareholders about its virtualization strategy: a remarkable number of executives are leaving its subsidiary PlateSpin after the acquisition, Recon (formerly PowerRecon) doesn’t get a significant upgrade since over one year and its development unit is being moved to India, the announced stand-alone virtualization platform based on Xen is not here yet, Oracle is probably building a powerful hypervisor to compete against Novell by merging its product and the Sun and the Virtual Iron ones.
Despite all of that Novell didn’t touch any of these topics at all during its Q2 earnings call, which took place on May 28, three days after virtualization.info broke the news about them.
The only thing that Novell had to say about PlateSpin was:
Turning to our newer SRM products, we remain excited about the opportunities for PlateSpin and Managed Objects, which provide cross-platform data center solutions. The market opportunity has moved towards large, complex, multi-site consolidation initiatives. We believe our premium virtualization and workload life cycle management tools provide superior solutions for companies seeking enterprise class capabilities for management of their mixed IT environments.
During the quarter several product updates were launched including PlateSpin Orchestrate, PlateSpin Recon and Business Service Management.
If this doesn’t shock anybody, it’s much more surprising that not a single analyst that attended the call asked for clarifications.
The call transcript kindly provided by Seeking Alpha demonstrates that the destiny of Novell in the virtualization space is something that nobody cares about. And this is even worse than losing a big number of executives.