(Novell Inc., Provo, UT, www.novell.com) Novell was founded as Novell Data Systems in 1981 by Jack Davis and George Canova and initially manufactured terminals for IBM mainframes. In 1983, Ray Noorda became CEO and president of a restructured Novell, Inc., which would concentrate on the development of its NetWare operating system. In the early 1990s, NetWare became the most widely used server operating system for PC networks.

With the acquisition of AT&T's Unix in 1993 and WordPerfect and Quattro Pro in 1994, Novell extended its system software products and branched into applications. It planned to integrate UnixWare and NetWare into a "super" network operating system, but instead sold Unix to the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) in 1995 and WordPerfect and Quattro Pro to Corel Corporation in 1996. From that point, it continued to concentrate on NetWare, its highly acclaimed NDS (Novell Directory Services), later renamed eDirectory, as well as related products for the Internet.

In 2003, Novell shifted its focus to open source software with the acquisition of Linux distributors, Ximian and SuSE. Both Ximian and SuSE offered Linux desktops, while SuSE provided Linux servers. Novell also announced the discontinuance of the NetWare brand by combining the NetWare 7 kernel and SuSE Linux Enterprise Server into a single integrated package named Open Enterprise Server. See NetWare and eDirectory.