Novell’s Vibe Cloud floats away

July 28, 2011 Off By David
Grazed from The Register.  Author:  Rik Myslewski.

After floating it around the market for only three months, Novell has decided to evaporate its Vibe Cloud web-based "social collaboration platform for the enterprise".

The decision to decommission the Vibe Cloud service as of September 30 was announced by Novell’s new president and GM Bob Flynn in a Thursday post on the company blog, optimistically entitled "Defining the Next Chapter of Novell: Focus and Commitment".

According to Infoworld, Vibe Cloud had a mere 50 customers, all of them using the stripped-down free version – stats that must have made the decision a relatively easy one for Flynn, who has been Novell’s headman for even less time than Vibe Cloud has been a product offering: Vibe Cloud came out of beta on April 4 – just over two weeks before Novell’s acquisition by Attachmate was completed – and Flynn’s appointment was announced on May 18.

The Vibe platform, however, isn’t disappearing from Novell’s offerings – it’s merely leaving the cloudy heights of offsite service. Vibe OnPrem, the company’s enterprise-hosted team collaboration service will be beefed up and incorporated into their GroupWise messaging, calendar, and collaboration suite, which Infoworld notes has around 30 million end users.

Flynn promises that more will be revealed about the Novell’s plans for these and other products at the company’s BrainShare customer and partner confab, to be held on October 10-14 in the marvelously named Salt Palace Convention Center in Salt Lake City, Utah.