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

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

[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.

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?

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: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.