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With the battle of the browser on the wane - and Microsoft picking up more market share with every click - Netscape has been teaming up with all manner of competitors to ensure itself a future.
The latest deal is a curious alliance between the browser-maker and one of its competitors, networking leader Novell. The joint venture announced Friday was described by Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale as part of his company's strategy "to lead the third wave of the Internet."
The two companies - each still leaders in their respective primary fields but rapidly losing customers to Microsoft - will form a jointly held private company to adapt Netscape's SuiteSpot server software to run on the Novell operating system. The combined system will allow users of Novell IntranetWare to set up Web sites on what have been solely intranet servers, without making the switch to Windows NT.
"Netscape's not going to replace the Microsoft paradigm, but it is doing a good job of putting the pieces in place to replicate a full service corporate network," said analyst Jonathon Cohen at Smith Barney.
Novonyx, the joint venture, is being set up to streamline an engineering process that could ostensibly have been carried out within the existing company structures. Novell COO Jospeh Marengi said in a conference call that the joint venture would get product to market more quickly - and therefore stem the flow of NT.
This venture, following fast on the footsteps of Netscape's deal with Yahoo!, in which the browser maker handed off the resource-consuming distraction of producing online content to the search engine, is one of a string Netscape has made as it embraces the "third wave" strategy, focused on the corporate intranet/extranet market instead of the browser.
Earlier this month, Netscape announced it was joining IBM, Oracle, and Sun to develop an open standard for integrated network computing so that all network elements will work together as if they had been created with the same development tools and language, and with the same runtime. Netscape previously agreed to participate with 40 companies in the creation of open standards for extranets to enable development of "crossware" to accommodate competing directory, security, and software distribution systems.
"Novell ships more copies (4 million to date) of server operating software than Windows NT or Unix, and that is a huge untapped opportunity for Netscape," Barksdale said.
