At GWAVAcon last week, Novell announced that GroupWise had increased its number of users by 3% over the past year, bringing the total to 29.4 million people.  GroupWise 8, launched in November, was named by eWeek as a "Product to Watch?" in January.  GroupWise has 10,000 customers and is used by 47 of the 50 US state governments.  GroupWise continues to be adopted by new customers, particularly outside of the United States, including a few very large customer adoptions.  Novell is focusing on new opportunities for GroupWise, particularly with regard to ActiveSync integration and the Mac, both of which are high priorities for Novell.  GroupWise has a very strong partner community, including GWAVA, Messaging Architects, SilverDane, Omni, Notify, RIM and many others.  Plus, Novell has more cash on hand per employee than some of its key rivals in the messaging and collaboration space.

To be sure, GroupWise is in a distant third place to Exchange and Notes and won’t threaten the position of the market leaders anytime soon.  GroupWise will continue to face intense competition from Microsoft and IBM, as well as a slew of competitors attempting to knock it out of its third place position in the workplace messaging and collaboration market.  Microsoft and IBM have substantially more marketing resources to bring to bear for Exchange and Notes, respectively, than Novell has for GroupWise.  All of that said, however, GroupWise seems to be holding its own and is putting development dollars into the offering.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, the death of GroupWise has been greatly exaggerated.