Estimated reading time: 1 minute, 15 seconds

NOVELL'S LINUX SALES STRONG

Open Source still doesn't come close to the revenue Windows generates. But Novell reported good gains in its Linux business for the year ended October 30. The company said it got $157 million of product revenue from open platform solutions with $149 million from Linux products.
The Linux total was up 21 percent over that of fiscal 2008. That came as revenue from identity, access and compliance management dropped 10 percent to $112 million. And the company's loss jumped to $212.7 million for fiscal 2009, compared to $8.7 million last year. The loss stemmed from a fourth-quarter charge of $279.1 million for the impairment of assets and goodwill. Revenue for the recently ended year was $862.2 million, a drop of just under 10 percent from $956.5 million last year. This is one place where GAAP versus non-GAAP reporting gets very interesting since non-GAAP net income excludes the impairment charge. Fourth-quarter non-GAAP net income of 11 cents per share makes a strange comparison to a GAAP loss of 74 cents per share. The nostalgic might be interested to know that OES and NetWare-related revenue is still a significant source of income, although obviously on a steady downward pace. The revenue for that category for 2009 was $177.8 million, down 15.8 percent from $205.9 million a year ago. But in a further testament to maintenance as a source of money, the license fees for this category were $20.2 million for fiscal 2009, a 48.6 percent drop from $39.4 million last year while maintenance and subscription revenue of $157.5 million was off only 5.4 percent from $166.5 million last year. Software may come and go, but maintenance goes on forever.
Read 2157 times
Rate this item
(0 votes)

Visit other PMG Sites:

PMG360 is committed to protecting the privacy of the personal data we collect from our subscribers/agents/customers/exhibitors and sponsors. On May 25th, the European's GDPR policy will be enforced. Nothing is changing about your current settings or how your information is processed, however, we have made a few changes. We have updated our Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy to make it easier for you to understand what information we collect, how and why we collect it.