Novell users unfazed by Messman's ouster

22.06.2006
Novell Inc.'s decision to replace CEO Jack Messman with Ron Hovsepian may have been sudden, but it didn't shock many Novell customers and observers, who were unequivocal in praising Hovsepian's ascension. Until Thursday, Hovsepian had served as Novell's president and chief operating officer.

"I'm not really surprised. Ron is a much more dynamic individual than Jack," said Brent Biernat, assistant vice president for network services at COCC, an Avon, Conn.-based provider of technology services to banks. COCC has been a Novell customer for a decade, and three years ago, it moved more than 60 servers to SUSE Enterprise Linux.

Biernat said he has met Hovsepian, a longtime IBM executive who joined Novell in 2003, five times. "He had no qualms about getting on the corporate jet and flying out to meet us customers. He was very, very engaged. Jack sometimes seemed pained to have a conversation. No offense to Jack, but I'm surprised he made it as long as he did."

Messman, 66, took over the Waltham, Mass.-based business software vendor from current Google Inc. CEO Eric Schmidt in 2001 after the consulting firm he ran, Cambridge Technology Partners Inc., was bought by Novell. The remnants of that acquisition, Novell's Celerant Consulting unit, was sold off last month.

Messman, who has been a Novell director since 1985, oversaw Novell's painful move away from a reliance on its once-dominant NetWare operating system to an embrace of open-source and Linux technologies.

The beginning of that turnaround strategy, however, was largely credited to Vice Chairman Chris Stone, Messman's second-in-command who was widely considered to be his heir apparent before he left Novell in November 2004.