Novell Linux Business Spikes Since Microsoft Deal

StonyandCher writes "Novell's divisive deal with Microsoft has apparently resulted in some financial success for the company. PC World is now reporting that the company's Linux business has risen about 250% since the deal was announced last November. From the article: '[Novell director of marketing Justin Steinman] said part of its growth was directly related to the Microsoft deal, adding that Novell has billed more than US$100 million in business through its Microsoft relationship. He added that the growth was also due to the halo effect of the arrangement. "When we're out there competing with Red Hat, [our salespeople] are saying, 'Our Linux is recommended by Microsoft,' and customers that already have a Windows investment say it seems to make sense to pick the Linux that works with Windows."'"

Comments

Red Hat is also doing well

[sayfawa]

The Aussie PC World has a current article about Red Hat's profits which are also up heavily since last year.

So maybe Novell and Red Hat's recent success is independent of the MS deal.

One or two customers

[xzvf]

Wal Mart going to Novell is enough to spike the numbers 250%. Red Hat had a solid quarter even with the drag of JBoss. Maybe the increase has a lot to do with Linux moving past the "Replace expensive proprietary Unix Phase" where hardware costs in addition to software costs made the savings obvious to pin head bosses, and is now moving into the "Replace hard to manage and support Windows phase" where the initial cost advantage is lower and required the establishment and training of quality Linux administrators? Unix replacement phase created the staff and cost advantages to allow for easier justification of Windows replacement. The fact that Novell is up significantly from practically nothing, and Red Hat is growing solidly from a strong base, indicates deeper market penetration for Linux.

Re:Marketing

[Colin Smith]

Well, what's the point of having lots of different groups of people make their own distributions, then? The freedom to do so.

HTH.

Re:Works with Windows, or MS?

[psbrogna]

They usually mean common (shared) file sharing & authentication service. I'm sure in certain cases this extends to other services but I'm pretty sure these two cover the vast majority of the functionality referred to.

Re:Marketing

[SpiritGod21]

This is blatantly incorrect. I can connect SuSE to our Active Directory during installation through a GUI quite easily, or after installation at any time through the YaST administrative utility. In a Microsoft environment, SuSE makes things easy.

Ubuntu, on the other hand, requires roughly 3 hours of hacking and coding. Canonical has no interest whatsoever in making it play nice with Windows beyond implementing and supporting SMB.

SUSE 10.0 is sleek indeed

[snikulin]

I have SUSE Enterprise Desktop at work (we are in MS Srv2003 world).
It's very nice as a corporate desktop.

Pros:
It has connected to our Directory seamlessly during installation.
All network printers and shares are OK, with correct access rights.
Installation and driver support, IMO is the best among all Linuxen( ~xes? :).
The domain controller recognized it as a domain member and listed it as such.
Nice and laconic KDE (but the installation defaults to Gnome).
Slack-derived init scripts and layout (well, I personally like it more then Debian-derived one).

Cons:
It does not have text mode installation target.
Yast is absent (I really liked it in previous versions!).

Conclusion:
I like it!

Disclaimer:
I run at home two SUSE (old 10.0, non-enterprise one) servers for about 3 years.
Previously they were powered by SUSE 9.3 and before that by Slackware.