A Not-So Fond Farewell to Wall Street Analysts

If you’ve ever worked for a publicly traded company, you probably know how much time and energy is spent focusing on measuring financial performance, projecting future performance—and frankly—presenting your story in the most favorable light. It can really distract you from the real task at hand—creating solutions for your customers that solve real-world problems.

Now that I’m working for NetIQ, a privately-held company, all I can say is, what a difference the right merger can make! No more pandering to Wall Street analysts anymore. The focus is totally different.

In my recent blog, titled NetIQ, WorkloadIQ and Natural Selection, I explained why the Attachmate Group’s acquisition of Novell made so much sense. After getting an inside view of NetIQ, I couldn’t be more excited.

Company leadership has created a truly remarkable environment where innovation can thrive with a laser focus on meeting customer expectations rather than simply meeting the numbers. Why? For starters, as a privately held company, NetIQ only answers to customers. As such, we are now free to focus solely on a single, consistent, long-term goal: delivering remarkable software.

Forgive my one-track rant, but I can’t begin to tell you how frustrating it can be to be judged by overeducated yet unprepared financial analysts who couldn’t even spell Novell correctly—let alone understand the value and future potential of WorkloadIQ solutions. Their only concern was whether we would beat quarterly expectations by a penny.

I realize these guys have their place, but I’ve recently spent time meeting with a different type of analyst—IT industry analysts who actually understand technology and the role it can play in business enablement. These thoughtful IT industry pros are anxious to discuss the new NetIQ and learn about our technology roadmap as well as the vision for WorkloadIQ going forward. They tend to be extremely impressed with the direction of NetIQ and our ability to deliver game-changing solutions for IWM. According to one leading analyst, “NetIQ has showed me more clarity and vision since the Novell acquisition than everything [a very successful security software company] has done in the past 5 years.”

NetIQ has proven products and technologies—not to mention loyal customers. And, with the merger, it just received an infusion of very talented people. I learned a few facts about the new NetIQ that you may find of interest. For example, NetIQ is:

• As large as former Novell, but solely focused on delivering customer value through intelligent workload management solutions
• The largest privately-held systems management software company in the world

Get ready to watch history being made. Our vision is sound and our ability to execute is stronger than ever. IT analysts will tell you as much. More importantly, so will our customers.

–Richard