Novell Announces Agreement to Acquire SUSE

Mickey Hill writes "Novell today announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire SUSE LINUX, one of the world's leading enterprise Linux companies, expanding Novell's ability to provide enterprise-class services and support on the Linux platform. Novell expects the transaction to close by the end of its first fiscal quarter (January 2004). This latest move follows Novell's August purchase of Ximian."

Comments

Great timing with respect to Red Hat moves

[Anonymous Coward]

Novell/Suse is going to pick up the slack left by Red Hat getting out of the retail market. Very good indeed. Hope Suse is repackaged into the the red and white Novell style. I get the feeling that Red Hat will live to regret abandoning its base.

KDE?

[overshoot]

I wonder where this is going to take the desktop.

Novell apparently is more interested in the Connector than the Ximian desktop, and more interested in SuSE's servers than its desktop offerings. However, SuSE has been a huge backer of the KDE project and Ximian is the home of Gnome. It'll certainly be interesting to see how the Novell management allocates their resources going forward, won't it?

Re:KDE?

[Kur]

Not long after the Ximian acquisition, I attended a presentation by Chris Stone, Novell's vice chairmain (and the real CEO, if not in title), and he made it very clear that Novell was planning a significant push onto the desktop with Linux. He also indicated that Novell was likely to make other Linux purchases. Well, I guess they just did.
Novell wants to be an end to end solution, from desktop to server to management. He sees Novell's earlier failure stemming from two problems: no developer support and no desktop offering (DR-DOS did not compete with Windows). He sought to rectify the first problem by buying SilverStream, but that wasn't enough. Give him credit for understanding that the real movement is in Open Source and not J2EE. Thus it also made sense to buy Ximian and instantly acquire an open source development base. Next, Novell needed a Linux distro. Again, to his credit, they bought one instead of developing their own. Now, Novell has to tie all of those pieces together.
What does Novell bring to open source/Linux/etc? A large support, developmnent, and sales organization. Despite the declining marketshare of Netware, there are still many, many enterprises running on Netware and/or using Novell products. Novell's products are not as visible, simply because they're mostly infrastructure. How many people run eDirectory on their desktops? But, how many companies use it for authentication? Novell's taking a different course than IBM and, thus, stands a chance.

Looks like the war is over

[BubbaTheBarbarian]

For over three years now the differing factions at Novell have been fighting over which route to take in relation to the what will be the backbone of it's products. The Netware factions has been directly responsible for Novell NOT developing it's own Linux, despite them having their own kernel and distro in house.

While this move is good for Novell, and good for the community, it has taken way to long in coming. This is partly due to the fact that if Novell HAD gone with Linux three years ago, they would have been the major supplier of the OS right off the bat for IBM, with IBM offering Linux based servers and caching boxes. When Novell dropped the ball, IBM pulled out.

Another point to make here is what this will do in relationship to SCO. You may well remember the piece a few weeks ago that talked about a statement that Novell made, quietly at the time, that the license that SCO had to sell licenses to UNIX came from them. I would expect a major blowup from SCO in the next few weeks, though do not be suppressed if Canopy decides to kill SCO outright and take the tech into Netware Linux. Canopy waffles more then Clinton at a beach party.

One other point...I have NEVER seen a machine serve as fast as a Linux box controlling files that are on Netware partitions. Say what you want about Netware being owned, but with the 2.4 kernel and multi-threading issues resolved (another reason why Novell was very hesitant to go with a 2.2 kernel based system) I would expect to see something really good from them in near future.

"a company with no future"

[djeaux]

Let's face it: Novell is a company with no future.

A company that refuses to retool, change directions, acquire new interests, etc. is a company with no future. Acquiring Suse proves that Novell isn't quite ready to relegate itself to the footnotes of history. Time will tell... Personally, I don't think Novell will be able to every regain the dominance it enjoyed 10 years ago, but again, time will tell. At the very least, Novell is acquiring a technology that will be used, rather than following the lead of The-Company-That-Must-Not-Be-Named & just buying competition to kill it.

Another Novell screw-up coming?

[sphealey]

I have always liked Novell technology, despite its quirks and flaws. And back in the day no technology supplier gave its customers better support than Novell. In fact, my first experience with Novell tech support was at 2 AM on Easter Sunday - with our support contract not yet approved by either company's legal dept, they nonetheless had a developer on the line by 4 AM who worked with us for 8 hours to get the problem fixed. So this could be a good thing.

Vs. Microsoft this is a tricky move, because I think even the Bush Justice Dept would look very hard at Microsoft entering the Linux market.

But historically, Novell has thrown away every technology and market advantage they have ever held, and handed their business on a silver platter to Microsoft (and maybe Sun). So does this mean Novell will now screw up SuSE, whose distribution I like a lot?

sPh

Check out the third paragraph too...

[Ripplet]

Novell today also announced that IBM intends to make a $50 million investment in Novell

Now that is a very interesting number indeed!
And I think it sends a very powerful message to all those businesses out there that are succumbing to the SCO FUD (hey can we shorten that to SCUD!). IBM are basically putting their money where they're mouth is to show their confidence in the future of Linux. Nice one.

Novell, tread very carefully, please.

[EvilNight]

SuSE's got a damn good thing going. Don't muck it up. It's one thing if you want to bring enterprise level functionality and a slew of awesome new features to Linux (and to SuSE Linux in particular), but it's quite another thing to buy out a linux company and force them to take their linux distro in a different direction. I hope you choose the former and not the latter. SuSE is doing a dynamite job, so stay out of their way. Help, don't hinder.

I've been using SuSE in the office since v7, and for my money it's the only distro I'll touch because it's easily the most advanced one on the market and I can get excellent technical support for it any time I need it (which isn't often, but in business you absolutely must have the security blanket). I'm going to be quite pissed off (and switching vendors) if this changes because of Novell's influence.

Don't be dense and stop offering it for free like Redhat did, either (Fedora is not RedHat, different discussion entirely, see Redhat thread for discussion ad nauseum about this). It's a boneheaded move on so many levels. Nobody's saying you need to support the downloaded version (or even host it for free, people will mirror it after all), as long as you continue to release it so folks can get their hands dirty and get comfortable on the product without having to pay for it first. Using it for free for a time was the only way I could convince folks here to pay for it, and they did gladly once they saw how good SuSE is at doing its job.

Keep the Novell-ized components optional, please. Some of us aren't using Novell technology, and it's going to be very annoying if we have to install NDS and Novell client software even though we have no intention of using them. Keep the Novell additions optional, not mandatory. You'll need to lure us into using them by quality. I still remember the days when Novell had a good product. Hopefully that can happen again.

First Redhat... now SuSE. Tomorrow, Debian and Slackware will anounce a merger citing similar goals. I'm sure Thursday Mandrake will be bought out by Microsoft, followed by Linus selling the Linux trademark to SCO on Friday. Saturday we'll see Apple acquire all the rights to FreeBSD, and Sunday the world will simply end. After a week like that, most of us probably wouldn't mind. ;)

Serious misgivings.

[emil]

1. Novell has already invested heavily into UNIX by buying UNIX Systems Laboratories (USL) from AT&T. It didn't work out. Why are things different now?

2. Novell previously had strong ties to SCO/Caldera/SCaldera. SUSE also has/had strong ties via the UnitedLinux project. The contractual ties between the combined entity will be even stronger.

3. Ray Noorda and The Canopy Group must be seen as the primary instigator of SCO's assertions over the Linux kernel, with Microsoft a close second. While Ray Noorda lost control over Novell, what level of influence does he still retain over the company?

Somehow, I do not think that we are seeing the big picture.

Re:Serious misgivings.

[eer]

1) My take is that the NetWare kernel folks (everything is done in the kernel) and the UNIX folks could never agree on implementation details..neither wanted to give an inch. Eventually, when MACH and Chorus got into the discussion things melted down - lack of concensus. There was even an element of OS/2. Too many choices, not enough compelling reasons to abandon long-held beliefs.

2) To say that the Novell - SCO relations are "frosty" now would understate the picture ;-)

3) I don't see that Ray "lost control" over Novell, but rather that he gave it up so that the company could grow up and move along. Novell has certainly had a bad few years, but that cash-flow from NetWare 3.x, 4.x, 5.x and 6.x licenses has lasted a LOT longer than I imagined it would back in '95.

The company is pretty transparent, right now...we're doing Linux because that's where we see the business opportunity, and where we can leverage our deep, deep skills and experience running global customer support operations, among other things.

Re:The pressing issue:

[Pros_n_Cons]

I would bet that Novell/Suse arent going to piss off all the developers like Red Hat has done. Sure they will, once the community seems them being the most successfull we will shoot them down just like Redhat. RH has made some mistakes but nothing close to the M$ tag idiots throw at them. We hat thier success and the fact they're an American company. Don't beleive me? Read the 400 posts for this article, its obvious.

Scorecard

[emil]

Perhaps a review of previous Novell acquisitions is in order...

• DR-DOS
• USL/UnixWare
• WordPerfect
• Quattro Pro

None of these is currently a market leader. Perhaps RedHat ought not to shut the doors just yet.