Against all odds, conventional wisdom and Microsoft Corp.'s relentless marketing campaign, the mass migration to Windows NT Server as the foundation of the corporate intranet has stalled.

Instead of taking the road not traveled - or in this case, the NOS not tried, true and tested - many businesses are staying put. They're opting to build intranets that run mission-critical applications on their existing network operating systems like NetWare, Unix and yes, even the much maligned OS/2 Warp Server.

Users, whose future roadmap a scant year ago had signposts marked "All NT" have, in many cases, revamped their plans. The reasoning is simple: The NOS they have in place now works fine and Windows NT 5.0's ship date grows ever more elusive (it's now expected sometime next spring).

NT Too Late
"Hurry up and wait doesn't cut it. The market isn't standing still and neither are the demands of our end users and customers for better services, connectivity and applications," observes Thad Hymel, distributed systems manager at Hibernia National Bank in New Orleans, which has 5,000 users in 250 sites throughout Louisiana and Texas.

"Even if Microsoft's NT 5.0 and Active Directory were available now," Hymel reasons, "we'd still keep NetWare and Novell Directory Services (NDS) as our enterprise NOS. It's taken them six years, but Novell worked out the bugs and now has directories down to an exact science," Hymel says. In pragmatic terms, that means Hibernia can manage all 250 remote sites via NDS with fewer than 20 network administrators. "A wholesale switch to Windows NT would have meant tripling our administrative staff," Hymel says.

Ditto for Bill Peel, senior technical manager at the Bank of Montreal which has 6,000 users in 450 branches throughout Canada and remains committed to OS/2 Warp Server even though industry pundits have declared the operating system dead on numerous occasions. "We're keeping OS/2 Warp. It's here and it works," Peel says.

OS/2 Warp provides the Canadian bank with a solid, extremely stable intranet foundation. "With OS/2 Warp Server we achieve better than 99.5% availability and with its software distribution facilities we have only a 2% to 3% failure rate, which is much lower than the industry average of about 5% to 20% according to the Gartner Group,'' Peel says.

NT die-hards
To be fair, NT has its share of die-hard proponents. Those who prefer NT as their intranet server like its tight integration with Windows 95 and NT Workstation desktops, as well as with Microsoft Office and BackOffice suite of applications.

And many big shops have already made the switch from their legacy network operating systems to NT, believing that despite everything the future belongs to Microsoft. They include Dana Corp. and Nabisco, Inc., as well as several of the big Wall Street brokerage houses.

Moreover, Windows NT Server is the fastest growing network operating system over the last two years, according to just about every market research firm. And it shows no sign of abating (see chart).

But what a difference a year makes.

Mike Kearney, vice president of information technology engineering at Phoenix Home Life Insurance Co. in Enfield, Conn., is a longtime NetWare shop that's been steadily installing Windows NT Server as an applications server. The firm was among scores of users seriously contemplating
"going all NT as soon as 5.0 with the Active Directory shipped," Kearney says. But 'soon' turned into too late for the insurance firm.

Reconsidering NetWare
"We asked ourselves, 'who has a solid, stable network operating system with support for Java and advanced directory services?' " The answer is NetWare. No way would we risk building our intranets on NT domain directories," Kearney says.

Though IS managers' faith in the NetWare platform is generally unflagging, the same isn't true of the way businesses viewed Novell's continued viability in the wake of a series of missteps that included bad acquisitions, wholesale management shakeups and shriveling sales. Novell's business prospects have improved in the last year under new company chief executive Eric Schmidt who has stabilized operations and succeeded in getting the company back on track delivering products. And the company's financials, while not spectacular, are once again showing growth. In its second fiscal quarter ended April 30, Novell earnings were up 35% to $19 million on sales of $262 million, beating Wall Street's expectations.

The vagaries of the networking industry over the past 12 months have similarly caused many users to switch strategies and have prompted industry analysts to revise their forecasts of "NT everywhere."

Matt Rice, vice president and senior network manager at USTrust Bank in Cambridge, Mass., sums it up this way: "[Because NDS exists now in NetWare 4.x,] there's just no compelling reason for us to install Windows NT 5.0 as an enterprise NOS. By the time it ships in 1999, we'll be running smack into the Year 2000 issue. Two headaches of such magnitude would be more than we could bear," Rice says.

Especially since USBank, which has nearly 100 branches, has already worked through all the pain of the first three releases of NDS which Rice recalls, "were pretty ugly" in the early '90s. "I don't want to start all over again if I don't have to," he says.

Jerry Ryan, manager of network services at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh concurs. He recalls the "rocky start and instability" of NDS in NetWare 4.0. "There was hell to pay for a year and a half until we got NetWare 4.11. For two months all we did was troubleshoot and hunt for objects that mysteriously disappeared and reappeared off the directory tree," Ryan says.

He says he tells any pro-NT 5.0 and Active Directory factions at the hospital that he wouldn't even consider it "until Version 6.0."

Back on Track
"Fortunately, Novell is starting to come back. And I'm glad for selfish reasons, since I don't want to rip out and replace NetWare,' Ryan adds.

An ancillary issue is the U.S. Justice Department's and states' ongoing probe of Microsoft for antitrust violations. While that doesn't directly affect NT deployment - at least not yet - users and analysts feel that the distraction of what's sure to be a protracted lawsuit will force Microsoft to take its eyes off the ball.

Meanwhile, though, Microsoft's competitors have been getting back on track, readying new versions of their operating systems - due out well in advance of NT 5.0 - that already feature more advanced directory services, clustering capabilities and better scalability than Microsoft's oft-delayed offering.

The Bank of Montreal's Peel, for example, notes that while Microsoft's Windows Terminal Server will only begin shipping this month the bank has been using OS/2 Warp Server's thin-client configuration for six years. "We've gotten tangible benefits for a long, long time. For instance, we only have to designate a single network administrator to manage 250 PCs," Peel says.

For staunch IBM OS/2 Warp Server loyalists weary of constantly justifying their continued use of the operating system and the dearth of third-party applications for the platform, the availability of Java applications holds incredible allure. Once Java applications begin shipping en masse, it will make the issue of the underlying network operating system a moot point.

Novell has also improved its core NDS database with new features like Catalog Services, which lets network managers create lightweight indexes of directory objects and attributes. The end result is faster, more efficient directory searches. The latest version of NDS also includes a WAN Traffic Manager to enable administrators to define cost-based WAN connections and policies and support for LDAP Version 3.0.

Jon Oltsik, an analyst at Forrester Research, Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., says such leading-edge features in NDS as automatic software distribution and updates and tree pruning are arriving just when users really need them. They're also helping to recast Novell's image as a "legacy file and print network operating system."

"NDS and NDS for NT work and they're here now. Windows NT 5.0 and the Active Directory are still slideware, and users can't deploy promises," Oltsik says. The real test though, he says, will come when Novell delivers the native version of NDS for NT sometime in the second half of this year. That standalone product, which won't require users to run NetWare, may represent Novell's best chance to leverage NDS as a service to and well beyond the installed base of NetWare customers, Oltsik says.

USTrust Bank is a case in point. Rice says he was able to quantify to management that 30% of the calls to USTrust's help desk are related to password synchronization problems. This will be resolved by native NDS for NT. "I told my bosses it presently takes 20 minutes to fix that problem and we have 2,000 users. Native NDS for NT will eliminate it entirely," Rice says.

NT Gains
Still, there is no denying the impressive gains racked up by NT Server over the last 18 months - some of it in entirely new installations and some of it at the expense of competitors. And users acknowledge that Windows NT Server is the network operating system of choice when deployed as a departmental applications server.

An IS manager at one of the nation's
largest brokerages that made a wholesale switch to NT in 1997, and who requested anonymity, said he's been "very pleased with NT's performance and reliability." The brokerage has sidestepped the management problems and myriad trust relationships associated with creating multiple domain directories by creating a single master domain to manage its entire enterprise.

"It works fine, we haven't had any problems, and Microsoft has more than kept its promises to us. From our vantage point, we wanted to move beyond NetWare's legacy file and print. Applications are the most important thing to us and nobody handles applications better than NT," the IS manager says.

But the intranet platform of choice for the masses, it is NOT - at least not until Windows NT 5.0 ships in 1999.

Phil Easter, technology strategist at Greyhound Lines, Inc. in Dallas sums up the feelings of many users who have decided to stick with NetWare: "There's no business benefit to switching to NT. If I were to rely on NT to get me to the Promised Land I'd be wandering around in the desert waiting for Microsoft to get its act together for another four years - way beyond the millennium."

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