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IBM Invests $50M in Novell, May Ship SUSE Linux
dave writes "Novell announced that it has finalized a $50 million investment from IBM, and that IBM can now begin shipping SUSE Linux on all IBM server platforms. Historically, IBM has been a 'Red Hat shop,' and one has to wonder if this is a harbinger of things to come."
Or, perhaps it's payback time. Novell were very supportive of IBM in the SCO debacle. Perhaps this is IBM saying thankyou. Wouldn't it be ironic if SCO's actions were what caused Linux to become an even stronger corporate presence
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
First they lost appreciation from personal users (Fedora affair), and now they lose support from big guys (IBM). I'd sell my Red Hat stock as soon as I could pick up the phone and contact my broker...
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All my submissions to Slashdot rejected... and proud of it!
HP and Novell are putting SUSE on it's desktops and laptops.
> Historically, IBM has been a 'Red Hat shop,'
This would explain why we have been running SuSE on our mainframes for the last two years then.
IBM has had marketing agreements with Red Hat, SuSE and and TurboLinux for quite some time. It may favour Red Hat in the States, but it seems quite agnostic about which distribution to recommend to customers.
You must have been out of the IT world for quite a while. IBM sells:
- intel servers (running linux or windows)
- AMD opteron servers (SUSE has an AMD64 port)
- power processor boxes (running AIX and linux)
A press release from 2000: SuSE delivers Enterprise Linux for IBM RS/6000
I've had a few dealings with IBM regarding Linux in the past few years, and they've historically been pretty agnostic distribution-wise, with some slant towards SuSE on the mainframe, and Red Hat on the x86 platform (but I've heard friends of mine say that IBM pushed SuSE very aggressively on the x86 platform too).
Remember that the first industrial-strenght implementation of a Linux system on the mainframe has been a joint effor by SySE and IBM.
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As far as I know SuSE have one of the two best PPC linux distros out there, the other one being Yellow Dog.
/. Where the truth
They are THE major player in the very large server market, however they are still a formitable competitor in the medium-sized to Pentium-class server market.
And for good reason. IBM packages their servers with a LOT of goodies. IBM Director (formerly known as Tivoli) comes free with every server. And now we're getting SuSE.
Yes, IBM is huge. They retooled as a consulting company so they deliver "solutions" more than hardware, and that is why they've been big on Linux. Basically, there are a ton of little Linux consultants out there but for top-tier corporations you would only hire a company of large standing. IBM is really the only player in this type of (growing) Linux market (although Sun is moving in that direction, but my boss thinks that Big Blue will want to buy them out.)
IMO, IBM could be thinking about buying Novell. A move like this helps them suss that out, but the acquisition of their own Linux distribution combined with a surprisingly large Netware install base is pretty attractive. Especially since just about all of the Netware sites are looking to move out of it there's a real opportunity for IBM to come in and make that happen on Linux before they go Microsoft.
* Please do not read my signature.
IBM continues to produce Wintel PCs, and I believe at least a portion of our Linux offerings also run on Intel architecture, but there has been a PowerPC version of Linux for at least the past 7 years. I'm not certain what SuSE is running on, but I think it could be PowerPC.
IBM has been far from a "Red Hat shop" in the past. SuSE has had -- until the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 -- better mainframe support, and SuSE's Enterprise distros for the Power architecture (pSeries & iSeries) has also been better.
/. anyway; why clutter a good post up with verifiable facts). IBM has also had a relationship with Red Hat (Hardware Management Consoles for the partitionable pSeries boxes use a customized RH distro), so it's not like they've been *only* SuSE.
You've been able to get SuSE Enterprise for Power with your pSeries box for a while now (sorry, no time to look up specifics, and this is
Remember, at one time, in the not-to-distant past, IBM was a "partner" with 4 different Linux distributors: Red Hat, SuSE, TurboLinux, and (gasp) Caldera. So, you might as well say IBM's been a "SCO shop" for a while, too.....
So. . . this should surprise no-one. IBM is omnipresent in Linux these days, but they have traditionally been the biggest force behind Suse (and now they are backing Novell).
My Guess As to Why? There are things that IBM can do hiding behind the names "Suse" and "Novell" that they cannot do as "IBM".
I think this is a great move. I moved to SuSE before for a while before I went to gentoo (simply because it's easier to update) and the SuSE people just do things well. It's like those German cars. When I first sat in a BMW and saw that the rear-view mirrors adjusted automatically when reversing or the window-wipers altered the length of their pause depending on your speed I thought "Nice job guys. Well done."
I get the same feeling when using SuSE - nice things you never even thought of.
Out of the IT World? More like off of the planet!
IBM is the #3 server vendor in the world behind HP and Dell. They have about 15% market share. IBM has been investing billions into Linux and the types of servers that would support it best (notably blade servers -- perfect for grids).
In December 2000 IBM committed to invest $1Billion in Linux software, hardware, services, the open source community and partnerships during 2001. That's only 2001! If anything, they have only increase their rate of investment.
Add to all of this their strong commitment to WebSphere and Java, and you have a company that has more than embraced Linux. When IBM invested 2.5 Billion in a new semiconductor manufacturing facility,they automated the facility using Linux.
Come back to our world where Big Blue is bigger & bluer than ever!
IBM is a company, and a company sells what its customers want. If 6% of IBM's customer base wanted to use dr-dos, im sure IBM would find a means to deliver it. Thats all, theres nothing more to see here. ;). Both home and personal versions on 8.2 and 9.
Suse, for those that havent used it, is a fantastic distro btw... it was the first one to convince me to buy a boxed copy
Also, suse sells 3 foot inflatible penguins on their website, i paid 25 bucks for mine, and TRUST ME... it impresses the ladies.
-- Caldera started by disgruntled Novell employees
--MS finances Caldera/SCO to sue IBM
--IBM induces Novell to register UNIX copyrights (after waiting 10 years to get around to it).
--Novell Buys SuSe
--SCO sues Novell
--Now IBM pours money into Novell
I know Novell is a company with a glorious past, but, just as SCO is a MS puppet/proxy, I think Novell is getting pulled into being a minor sattelite orbiting IBM.
Man, this is better than a soap opera !
Harbinger of things to come is the latest phrase from the department of redundancy department.
A harbinger describes things to come, so this phrase is equal to "A fortelling of things to come of things to come". Not only that, but Merriam-Webster (my online dictionary of choice, since dictionary.com implemented annoying popups and banners that give people siezures) lists 2b (n. one that foreshadows what is to come) as a precursor to the modern definition (one that pioneers or initiates a major change). Not that "an initiator of major change to come" makes much more sense, as "initiator of major change" already implies something is to come.
~Will
sig?
They've really turned around the compnay in a really short amount of time. I mean Netware as a product was sort of dying out and they sold most of Unix (or the brooklyn bridge, its hard to tell). I thought they would just fade off into the sunset, or linger like a rotting corpse as a shell of its former glorious self( See Borland). Those executives should get a nobel prize in business. Wait, they don't give a nobel prize for buisness. I guess their huge salaries and bonuses will have to be enough. But, seriously they did a really good job.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Has to be said, how long until IBM buys out Novell? They haven't exactly done too well these last few years, and Novell has a whole host of patents and IP that would fit in niceley with IBM. Not only that, but if this farce with SCO doesn't get dismissed soon, they would then be the direct owners of those Unix remnants that Novell holds onto.
Novell is moving more and more into Linux, and there next version of Netware is to be Linux based, with no more stand alone netware products they just announced. Novell was once king, as was IBM in it's heydey. Between them they could well become king again.
If you look into the past you can predict future. IBM is not stupid. They do not want to create another Microsoft. They are going to play on two horses, one being RedHat and the other SuSe/Novell. This makes room for IBM to make A LOT of money by selling hardware. Do not worry in five years, there will still be RedHat and SuSe - both having around 30% of the market. IBM will make it so.
Reliability. They are also faster than x86, especially in read/write to the HDD. Stripped arrays are fast.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
NOVELL has decided to go with KDE as desktop rather than GNOME.
Read more here. This is a direct quote from Novells Chris Stone.
It is now official - Netcraft has confirmed: Red Hat is dying. Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Red Hat community when recently IDC confirmed that Red Hat accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that Red Hat has lost more market share, news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Red Hat is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Red Hat's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Red Hat faces a bleak future.
In fact there won't be any future at all for RH because Red Hat is dying. Things are looking very bad for Red Hat. As many of us are already aware,
RH continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
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You may have heard Redhat called the Microsoft of Linux. This is a perception that is alive and well within IBM.
When I worked on the Linux Standards Base project, Redhat was very resistant to standardization. We'd open bug reports about LSB compliance issues, and they'd be hastily closed saying that Redhat wanted to do things their way. They ended up not participating in the UnitedLinux project, which was backed heavily by IBM and HP.
SuSE on the other hand was very involved with the LSB and UnitedLinux. They drove a bulk of the standardization efforts. They also have a very good support relationship with the IBM Linux developers.
So when it comes down to it, SuSE just wants IBM more than RH. They created a better working relationship. The only thing they really lacked was a strong North American presence. The merger with Novell solved that, and gave them a strong support and services arm to boot.
No, No, NO!
How many times must I say this to people
It's not a finger, it's the finger!
--This message brought to you by the society for the encouragement of correctly used insults, gestures, and otherwiuse rude behaviour.
--Keeping the flame wars alive, one post at a time
The biggest problem I've had over the past few months with Redhat is this:
Heaps of apps targeted and marketed towards the Redhat "platform".
Redhat has dropped support for old products... this means no security updates, which upsets corporate IT departments and PHBs. They all say "thou shall upgrade to a supported version"
However, the RH 8 platform is only two years old and unsupported.
Now if your apps are "supported only under Redhat 8", but your servers "must upgrade to a supported version", short of tedious technical assessments, Redhat has effectively killed the products you're using.
PHB's say "I knew we shouldn't have trusted this Linux crap! Now our apps are unsupported!"
Now... does the application developer target RH AS? Which has already crept to 2.1, or do they consider SuSE, Debian, or ditch Linux altogether?
I'm certain IBM has encountered this problem. There are apps on the IBM website which used to show Linux support for Redhat 8 and under, but now that RH8 is unsupported, the apps show no support for Linux at all.
IBM, a company which still provides support for OS/2, and will probably service your ball typewriter if you paid them enough, has to tell its customers "our supplier has dropped support."
Will IBM stick with Redhat?
Something is going to blow very, very soon. Redhat would be wise to offer support for prior versions... and NOW, and drop the BS version creep.
Their stellar stock performance over the past few months has come at the price of customer loyalty.
It gets old. You talk about email clients, and someone will insist that you can get by with a plain text mailer -- MIME attachments are passing fad. You talk about off-the-shelf routers, and somebody will wonder why you don't just use an old laptop running BSD. You discuss the problems of providing reliable downloads, and someone will insist that BitTorrent, a tool you need to be a total hacker to use, is a universal solution.
And of course there's the dude who asks, "I have no trouble working with Fedora, why is it a problem for IBM?" Of course it doesn't even occur to him that Red Hat gets the same amount of revenue for Fedora as they get for SuSE. Which is to say, none.
Repeat after me: "OTHER PEOPLE HAVE DIFFERENT NEEDS FROM ME."
I wonder what you do for a living. Do you write bad software and then call people idiots when they can't figure it out?
As for your girlfriend -- but no, given your expressed attitude towards people in general and women in particular, it makes more sense for you to handle sexual issues single-handedly. Forgive the pun!
OK. Cite some actual examples to back that up please. Alan Cox is one of the lead RedHat developers and submits and curates tons of patches. I'd like to know exactly what kernel patches you're talking about so that I can evaluate what you say.
Again, specifics please. AFAIK RedHat _enterprise_ support is competitively priced compared to other _enterprise_ offerings. RedHat also has educational discounts available. Show me the money: NovellSuSE vs. RedHat. Specifics or else stop spreading FUD.
RHCE is a _practical_ hands-on certification which shows that the holder can actually do something other than make marks on a bit of paper. LPI-1 and LPI-2 are good as supplements but they are not _practical_ certifications. Currently RHCE is the only certification that shows you're getting someone that can actually set up a box.
Yes YaST has been "open sourced". But which formerly "open source" software has RedHat made proprietary? Give an example please.
What's your metric for "buggy"? Define it and then show me how all the GNU/Linux distros stack up against each other. Otherwise this has the same informational value as the rest of your fact-devoid post.
Until you can provide further specific information I'll be taking your post as an empty, contentless, unverifiable FUD-spreading exercise.
A Debian GNU/Linux-running RHCE