Those sentiments were echoed by Joseph Tibbetts, Novells chief financial officer, who told eWEEK on Monday that the company must be careful about costs and so is looking at areas where money is being made and areas that are soft.

Expenses and staffing levels will have to be re-examined because "how long can you keep capacity around when the demand is not there?" he asked.

Among the better performing parts of Novells business are the secure identity management and secure Web services components, which have grown some 51 percent over the past year compared with the year before. It has generated some $90 million, or 10 percent of Novells business, Tibbetts said.

But, under Messmans stewardship, the Provo, Utah, firm is also taking active steps to become more visible and to better promote its products and services among customers, developers and the open-source community.

At its annual BrainShare customer conference in Salt Lake City, Novell on Monday unveiled a slew of product announcements, many of them around Linux and open source.

These included news that its GroupWise client will be made available for Linux and Macintosh, initially just on the desktop but ultimately on the server as well. This will give customers additional choices for taking advantage of that secure messaging platform, Messman said.

The Java-based GroupWise client for Linux and Macintosh is based on technology Novell acquired from N-iX, a division of Newcomp Computer Systems, and will be available to customers later this year.

Senior Vice President of Engineering Carl Ledbetter said the next version of Novells networking operating system, NetWare 7, will enable customers to run on top of the Linux kernel all of the services that now sit on top of the NetWare kernel. "This will give our customers even greater choice and allow them to migrate to Linux without having to move away from NetWare," he said.

The code for NetWare 6.5 is currently in beta, with the product expected to ship midyear. Novell releases upgrades to its major products every 18 months or so, so NetWare 7 will likely ship in late 2004, Ledbetter said.

But Messman cautioned that Novell is not going to contribute the entire NetWare kernel to the open-source community, just those pieces that need to make the movement viable. "We believe were bringing credibility to Linux. We know how to support an operating system—some of the people in that business today are far less experienced than we are," he said.

"We can bring some of the enterprisewide qualities of NetWare to bear on Linux, and were prepared to contribute some of those to the open-source community. Weve always been focused on interoperability and open standards. But we are now going to devote more time and resources to the open-source community and increase our visibility in that way," Messman said.

One such move was the announcement Monday that the company has released the source code for its Novell Nsure UDDI Server, which makes Web services registries more secure and easier to manage by adding identity management capabilities to the UDDI standard.