Comdex: Intuit QuickBooks bundled with NetWare

Novell Inc. yesterday announced an agreement with Intuit Inc. for a "soft bundle" of NetWare For Small Business 4.2 with the networked version of Intuit's QuickBooks Pro 6.0 accounting software. "This [deal] brings together the leader in networking and the leader in financial-management applications," says John Slitz, senior vice president of marketing for Novell, who unveiled the partnership at Fall Comdex.

The bundle, which begins shipping today, will be available exclusively through distributors TechData and Ingram Micro for a discounted price of $1,595 (£997), which is $300 (£188) less than it would cost to buy the products separately. NetWare For Small Business 4.2 without the QuickBooks component, sells for $1,295 (£809) for a five-user license, with additional user licenses available individually and in packs.

Novell officials played up the opportunities for resellers with NetWare For Small Business 4.2, noting that it provides resellers with a strong platform for hosting applications and managing customers' systems remotely. "This lets our resellers manage help desks on an outsourcing basis," says Michael Simpson, Novell director of marketing. "Users can just pick up a phone and get software distributed by their resellers."

Novell is pitting its small business offering directly against Microsoft Corp.'s BackOffice Small Business Server and IBM Corp.'s Small Business Suite, which will be launched officially at Comdex on Tuesday. NetWare For Small Business 4.2 supports 50 client access licenses. It provides users with an Internet Connection Wizard, BorderManager FastCache, NetObjects Fusion Web authoring tools, Network Associates' NetShield and VirusScan and Tobit FaxWare. Novell GroupWise and a five-user version of Oracle 8 also ship with every copy of Novell's small business offering.

At the NetWare For Small Business announcement, Novell officials also made some other commercial shipment announcements. Novell delivered to 40,000 customers this week its free Information Ferret tool, which is designed to check Novell products at the server level for Y2K compliance. (The tool also is downloadable from Novell's Y2K web site at http://www.novell.com/year2000.) In addition, Novell announced that version 1.1 of its systems management tool, Z.E.N.works, is shipping starting today.