Analysts said that unlike Schmidt's earlier departure, Messman's will result in minimal disruption. Hovsepian, 45, was promoted to president and COO in November and has "essentially been running things" at Novell since that time, according to Gordon Haff, an analyst at Nashua, N.H.-based Illuminata Inc.

"[Hovsepian] has a stronger operational background," said Stacey Quandt, an analyst at Boston-based Aberdeen Group Inc. That ought to bode well for users unhappy with Novell's recent inability to execute, she said.

"They get you excited by telling you what the vaporware is," said Rudy Ebisch, systems technical support director at printer and copier vendor Canon USA Inc. in Lake Success, N.Y. Canon uses NetWare, SUSE Linux and other Novell products. "Tell me what you're doing, not what you are going to do. If they deliver, it will be great. We're not going anywhere."

"Novell is not Microsoft; they don't have the capital resources to support so many products," Biernat said. "They are going to have make some hard decisions that will likely make some customers unhappy."

"They should probably consider dropping their e-mail and collaboration suite [GroupWise]. It's not competitive anymore," said one CTO at a large nonprofit health care provider, which uses SUSE Enterprise Linux as well as Novell's identity management products. "But I'd like to see them move more aggressively into supporting the open-source application stack, such as a database or an application server. And they should take advantage of their experience and depth of customer support. Red Hat has never impressed us with their support." The executive requested anonymity.