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."'"

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 :-)

"Works with Windows"

[Anonymous Coward]

Using pure marketing like that with clueless CIOs to make sales is going to backfire something fierce in the long term. As soon as there are any problems with compatibility they'll drop Novell and move back to Windows for whatever they were doing and it'll get counted as a win for Microsoft (cue the "xxxx switched from Linux to Windows!" tripe).

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...

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.

Novell is more than just Linux

[LinuxDon]

Please remember that Novell offers much more than just the basic Linux stuff.
It offers a Novell client for windows, eDirectory, ZENworks, iFolder, iPrint, Groupwise etc, etc.
These are products targeted at managing Windows (and linux) workstations and servers but through a Linux server.
Novell products integrate seamlessly with Windows and they even (implicitly) solve many of the typical windows problems for you.

SLES on itself, however, does not offer a Windows advantage when compared to other distro's. It is the commercial closed source software that Novell offers that makes the advantage.

RedHat does not offer such services for Windows.
(Please note that I am just a Novell Open Workgroup Suite customer. http://www.novell.com/products/openworkgroupsuite/ [novell.com] )