Novell, Inc. /noʊˈvɛl/ was a software and services company headquartered in Provo, Utah. It had been instrumental in making Utah Valley a focus for technology and software development. Novell technology contributed to the emergence of local area networks, which displaced the dominant mainframe computing model and changed computing worldwide.

The company was originally an independent corporate entity until it was acquired as a wholly owned subsidiary by The Attachmate Group; this later was acquired in 2014 by Micro Focus International, of which Novell is now a division.

The company began in 1979 in Orem, Utah as Novell Data Systems Inc. (NDSI), a hardware manufacturer producing CP/M-based systems. Former Eyring Research Institute (ERI) employee Dennis Fairclough was the member of the original team that started Novell Data Systems. It was co-founded by George Canova, Darin Field, and Jack Davis. Victor V. Vurpillat brought the deal to Pete Musser, chairman of the board of Safeguard Scientifics, Inc., who provided the seed funding.

The company initially did not do well. The microcomputer produced by the company was comparatively weak against performance by competitors.

In order to compete on systems sales Novell Data Systems planned a program to link more than one microcomputer to operate together. The former ERI employees Drew Major, Dale Neibaur and Kyle Powell, known as the SuperSet Software group, were hired to this task.

At ERI, Fairclough, Major, Neibaur and Powell had worked on government contracts for the Intelligent Systems Technology Project, and thereby gained an important insight into the ARPANET and related technologies, ideas which would become crucial to the foundation of Novell.

The Safeguard board then ordered Musser to shut Novell down. Musser contacted two Safeguard investors and investment bankers, Barry Rubenstein and Fred Dolin, who guaranteed to raise the necessary funds to continue the business as a software company as Novell Data Systems' networking program could work on computers from other companies.

Davis left Novell Data Systems in November 1981, followed by Canova in March 1982.

Rubinstein and Dolin, along with Jack Messman, interviewed and hired Raymond Noorda. The required funding was obtained through a rights offering to Safeguard shareholders, managed by the Cleveland brokerage house, Prescott, Ball and Turben, and guaranteed by Rubenstein and Dolin.

Major, Neibaur and Powell continued to support Novell through their SuperSet Software Group.

In January 1983, the company's name was shortened to Novell, Inc., and Raymond Noorda became the head of the firm. Later that same year, the company introduced its most significant product, the multi-platform network operating system (NOS), Novell NetWare.

NetWare

The first Novell product was a proprietary hardware server based on the Motorola 68000[citation needed] CPU supporting six MUX ports per board for a maximum of four boards per server using a star topology with twisted pair cabling. A network interface card (NIC) was developed for the IBM PC industry standard architecture (ISA) bus. The server was using the first network operating system (NOS) called ShareNet. Later, ShareNet was ported to run on the Intel platform and renamed NetWare. The first commercial release of NetWare was version 1.5.

Novell based its network protocol on Xerox Network Systems (XNS), and created its own standards from IDP and SPP, which it named Internetwork Packet Exchange (IPX) and Sequenced Packet Exchange (SPX). File and print services ran on the NetWare Core Protocol (NCP) over IPX, as did Routing Information Protocol (RIP) and Service Advertising Protocol (SAP).

NetWare uses Novell DOS (formerly DR-DOS) as a boot loader. Novell DOS is similar to MS-DOS and IBM PC DOS, but no extra license for DOS is required; this came from the acquisition of Digital Research in 1991. Novell had already acquired Kanwal Rekhi's company Excelan, which manufactured smart Ethernet cards and commercialized the Internet protocol TCP/IP, solidifying Novell's presence in these niche areas.

Novell did extremely well throughout the 1980s. It aggressively expanded its market share by selling its expensive Ethernet cards at cost. By 1990, Novell had an almost monopolistic position in NOS for any business requiring a network.

With this market leadership, Novell began to acquire and build services on top of its NetWare operating platform. These services extended NetWare's capabilities with such products as NetWare for SAA, Novell multi-protocol router, GroupWise and BorderManager.

Beyond NetWare

However, Novell was also diversifying, moving away from its smaller users to target large corporations, although the company later attempted to refocus with NetWare for Small Business. It reduced investment in research and was slow to improve the product administration tools, although it was helped by the fact its products typically needed little "tweaking" — they just ran.

Under Noorda, Novell made a series of acquisitions interpreted by many to be a challenge to Microsoft. In June 1993, the company bought Unix System Laboratories from AT&T Corporation, acquiring rights to the Unix operating system. In 1994, Novell bought WordPerfect Corporation, as well as acquiring Quattro Pro from Borland.

One of Novell's major innovations at the time was Novell Directory Services (NDS), now known as eDirectory. Introduced with NetWare v4.0 in 1993, NDS replaced the old Bindery server and user management technology employed by NetWare 3.x and earlier.

As Novell faced new competition, Noorda was replaced by Robert Frankenberg in 1994. The Noorda-era acquisitions were short-lived: In 1995, Novell assigned portions of its Unix business to the Santa Cruz Operation. WordPerfect and Quattro Pro were sold to Corel in 1996. Novell DOS was also sold to Caldera in 1996.

In 1996, the company began a move into Internet-enabled products, replacing reliance on the proprietary IPX protocol in favor of a native TCP/IP stack. The move was accelerated when Eric Schmidt became CEO in 1997, succeeding Frankenberg, who had resigned the previous year; Christopher Stone was brought in as senior vice president of strategy and corporate development, reporting to Schmidt.

The result was NetWare v5.0, released in October 1998, which leveraged and built upon eDirectory and introduced new functions, such as Novell Cluster Services (NCS, a replacement for SFT-III) and Novell Storage Services (NSS), a replacement for the Traditional/FAT filesystem used by earlier versions of NetWare. While NetWare v5.0 introduced native TCP/IP support into the NOS, IPX was still supported, allowing for smooth transitions between environments and avoiding the "forklift upgrades" frequently required by competing environments. Similarly, the Traditional/FAT file system remained a supported option.