Novell stock up on Compaq rumors

Novell_s stock surged 15 percent after a published report said the software maker was rumored to be in "discussions" with Compaq Computer to develop new products. Under such a partnership, the network software company and the PC maker, would develop "caching" products designed to help speed Internet use. The products would give organizations the capacity to store versions of popular Web sites on their office networks, eliminating the need to repeatedly download Internet information from scratch. Novell stock was up 3.31 at 23.44 on the Nasdaq market after the report appeared in Barron_s over the weekend. The stock, the third most actively traded issue on that exchange, has more than doubled in price since October. "Sentiment is definitely bullish," one options trader said of Novell. Shares of Compaq were up at 34.38 in trading on the New York Stock Exchange. Novell also announced the latest version of its so-called enterprise directory today targeted at corporate customers. Novell Directory Service v8 (NDC) enables customers better manage and track all the users on a corporate network. The product faces competition in that market from rival Microsoft, which has its own Microsoft Active Directory. Even so, analysts said Novell_s product was more robust and could be expanded to ever-larger systems more easily than rival_s. According to International Data Corporation, 80 percent of Fortune 1,000 companies now using directory services to manage and secure their networks already rely on NDS.