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

Maybe there are other reasons

[LiquidCoooled]

It could be people are moving their business from SCO to Novell ;)
I don't know how much novell charges for their Linux but its got to be less than $650 per seat.

Marketing

[porkThreeWays]

and customers that already have a Windows investment say it seems to make sense to pick the Linux that works with Windows Which is pure marketing because all the major distributions work equally well (or not well) with Windows. What I guess people still don't get is you pay for a support contract, not the distribution. All the major distributions are all basically of the same quality and use almost the exact same software. Maaaaaaybe a few configuration tools are different, but they are configuring the same software so it doesn't matter.

Re:Marketing

[porkThreeWays]

I never said they were the same, I said they all use basically the same software and major distributions are all of very high quality. I wouldn't exactly call Linspire or Gentoo "major" distros, but RHEL/Fedora, Suse, Ubuntu/Debian, are all very very very similar. I've been working with Linux and Unix in general for over 10 years and once you know what's under the hood, you realize distro wars are silly because they are all basically the same. What differs are high level configuration tools and support contracts. Regarding Windows interoperability, do you think MS has hacked together some super compatible version of Samba for Novell that Red Hat or Ubuntu don't have access to?

Re:Marketing

[aichpvee]

What does any of this have to do with "working with windows?"

Re:Marketing

[ta bu shi da yu]

Alternatively, it appears, you choose Novell's distro because "it seems to make sense to pick the Linux that works with Windows". Good to see CIOs are making rational business decisions.

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.

Re:Marketing

[Etyenne]

File system layout have been standardized in the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard and, AFAIK, all Big Three (Red Hat, Novell, Ubuntu) have been adhering to it pretty strictly. Anyway, third-party commercial applications should go in /opt and not mess around with the rest of the system, period.

Different distros ship different version of libraries, yes. But naming convention for libraries differ from distro to distro ? I do not understand what you talk about here.

And, yes, I have installed "enterprise" software, and their installer have been pretty consistently an awful hack slapped together as an afterthought by the vendor. And that include the horrible Oracle Java wizard. So, the blame lie squarely on the vendors as far as the crappiness of their installer is concerned if you ask me.

Re:Marketing

[Penguinisto]

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.

Probably because Ubuntu and SuSE are aiming for two entirely different markets? (home desktop users v. enterprise business)?

Sort of like the reason why I wouldn't expect a typical Dell desktop to come with multiple hot-swap drive bays, two built-in NICs, or a RAID controller, nor would I expect a Dell server to come with a pair of GeForce 8800's in SLI configuration, y'know?

/P

This story sound familiar?

[sammy baby]

"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."

Translation 1:

Wow! That "embrace" part was great, and this "extend" phase is fantastic! I wonder what's next?

Translation 2:

Wow! These guards are great - they gave me a delicious meal, and now they're taking me out to meet their "squad!" Wonder why they want me blindfolded?

More seriously: I haven't worked with Novell stuff since this deal was announced. Anyone have any insight as to how much easier it really is to integrate with Microsoft stuff?

Re:This story sound familiar?

[jimstapleton]

what do you think is going to happen to that business when Microsoft backs out of their deal, and start publicly denouncing Suse's inability to remain compatible?

SUSE will loose market share, and may even go to the Linux-distro graveyard. But remember, while SUSE is Linux, Linux is not SUSE.

This really is classic Microsoft strategy, make your competitor's success dependent on your compliance to something (HTML, Java, CIFS, OS/2), then stop complying with it. Microsoft's market weight guarantees that customers will follow them, and not their competitor. If tomorrow Suse Linux stops working well in a Windows network, which do you think businesses are going to dump?


The situation is different here. Linux has a lot more loyalty than some of your examples. Linux will only lose the people who tried Linux because there was an MS approved variant, and those people wouldn't have come over without this anyway. Some of them might even stay.

If MS is trying an E^3 with this, they might as well try putting their guns to their collective feet, because, they aren't going to decrease the popularity of Linux below what it would have been without their intervention. They may raise it above that level however...

Talk about a PR scam...

[tgatliff]

If this isnt a PR pushed document, I dont know what is.... Of course Novell's business increased simply due to the fact of M$ handing out vouchers to people which M$ then ends up paying for when they give it to someone. What they would like to give the impression is that this makes people feel safe, so they go this route instead of the unsafe route with RedHat. You will also notice that they did not point out the Redhat had an amazing quarter as well with them attributing it to botched Vista rollout.... Hm... I wonder why they felt compelled to release this press release now?? :-)

Re:Talk about a PR scam...

[arivanov]

Nothing to do with botched Vista rollouts or MSFT vouchers.

Linux vendors best quarters are the quarters when the financial market looks plain ugly. As a result people presenting projects to CIOs have to start making "immediate savings" noises instead of the usual TCO noises to get budgets approved. As a result the Linux vendors get a jump in revenue.

Disclaimer: I very well knoe that Linux TCO is considerably less than MSFT (as most of Slashdot). I am not a CIO though :-)

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: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.

Novell's taking advantage of dumb customers

[TemporalBeing]

"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."'"

So they're basically taking advantage of dumb customers that don't know much, if anything, about Linux as basically all Linux distros use the same software (e.g. Samba) - however, they vary in their packaging and support software & tools - to achieve that interoperability. It has nothing to do with being "blessed" by Microsoft - which is really just a death sentence - kind of like the one Hitler had in mind for Japan, and Italy, and the one he did try to carry out on Russia:

1. Make some "allies" and sign some "treaties"
2. Let your "allies" help you carry out your "war" on the "enemy"
3. Wipe out most everyone together with your "allies"
4. Turn on your "allies" one by one without telling the others
5. Wipe out your "allies" last when they are least suspecting it

Funny - Hitler had and Microsoft has the same basic plans. Just substitute "competitors" for "enemies" and "partners" for "allies".

Re:Novell's taking advantage of dumb customers

[e4g4]

Hehe - looks like Godwin kicked in a little early in this discussion :P

Re:Clearly a piece of PR puff

[badfish99]

I've met plenty of Windows-centric IT people who seem to think networking is some sort of black magic

I'm not surprised. Getting two Windows boxes to talk to each other on a network is black magic.

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.