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.