Partner and Customer Views on the Novell-Microsoft Agreement
"The City of Seattle's IT staff supports a number of different operating environments, including Microsoft Windows, Novell NetWare and several varieties of Unix/Linux. All of these environments require separate physical servers, and our data center is running out of space. This new Microsoft-Novell collaboration agreement could allow significant virtualization of servers, reducing the number of physical platforms we'd have to maintain. That, in turn, reduces costs for maintenance, electricity, cooling and space, saving taxpayer dollars, and helping improve of stewardship of the environment. This helps to meet key goals set by Mayor Greg Nickels in his Climate Action Plan."
— Bill Schrier, Chief Technology Officer, City of Seattle
"One of the results of the rapid growth of open source software is a world of "mixed code", IT environments comprised of both commercial and open source software. At Palamida, we are dedicated to assisting our customers with the new intellectual property (IP) compliance, licensing and software asset management issues that result. From our perspective, today's announcement from Microsoft and Novell is an important advance in interoperability in this mixed code world – interoperability not only with respect to technical issues, but also to IP issues. This is a major win for customers who will now receive a whole new level of support and assurance in their deployment of mixed code IT environments."
— Mark Tolliver, CEO, Palamida, Inc.
"In everything we do, we put our customers first. It is heartening to see longtime competitors like Microsoft and Novell do the same for the long term benefit of the IT industry customers. Meaningful collaboration between leading software vendors that builds bridges between proprietary and open source software is necessary for the IT industry. We welcome these initiatives and hope to see others join in."
— Eric Wilson, SVP and CIO, Raley's Family of Fine Stores
"This announcement validates both open source and proprietary software and is a tremendous development for the IT industry. By addressing open source IP issues and focusing on enabling greater interoperability between their open source and proprietary products, Novell and Microsoft have sent a strong signal to the industry – it's about customers, collaboration and innovation. Let's hope others follow their example."
— Catherine A. Allen, CEO, BITS Financial Services Roundtable
"This agreement is a positive example of how companies with different business models and approaches to intellectual property can work together. Hopefully this is a model that others in the industry will repeat. Intellectual property is a currency of exchange in the software marketplace and today's announcement is an important step in the continued progress of the IT industry as a whole."
— Eugene Roman, Group President, Systems and Technologies, Bell Canada
"This collaboration of open source and proprietary software is a win-win for the IT industry and our customers because it provides greater choice when developing comprehensive solutions. This alliance allows resellers to better address the specific needs of their end-user customers — even highly customized application needs. Congratulations to Microsoft and Novell for listening to customers, putting them first, and taking such a forward-looking approach."
— Jodi Honore, Vice President, Vendor Management, Ingram Micro North America
"Microsoft and Novell should be commended for putting customers and innovation before licensing ideology. This is the kind of achievement that can only be reached when parties respect one another’s innovations and intellectual property and put their customers first.
This announcement is a victory for customers and the industry, including small software developers developing solutions for both Windows and Linux platforms. It’s further proof that free market forces are working and enable a vibrant software ecosystem that provides customer choice, innovation and competitive products.
The reality is that customers are not interested in the best proprietary product or best open source product; they want the best product, period. With their pioneering approach, Microsoft and Novell are giving customers the choice they have demanded, leaving behind the philosophical licensing debates around open source and proprietary software."
— Jonathan Zuck, President, Association for Competitive Technologies
“We applaud Novell and Microsoft in their efforts to provide greater Windows and Linux interoperability. Customers want solutions that meet their individual needs, and higher levels of software interoperability give them the ability to more easily make the best choices.”
— Paul Otellini, President and Chief Executive Officer, Intel Corporation
“Windows and Linux are extremely important to our enterprise customers and the industry, and AMD strongly supports both. This agreement by Novell and Microsoft helps customers bridge the gap between these platforms, giving them greater flexibility in doing what works best for them. This is a great example of vendors working together to resolve complexity so their customers don't have to.”
— Hector Ruiz, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Advanced Micro Devices
“This technology and business collaboration provides a model that allows Microsoft and Novell to develop new solutions to enable open source and proprietary software to work better together in a mixed-source environment. We applaud these two companies for doing the hard work to build a bridge between Windows and Linux”
— Shane Robison, Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy and Technology Officer, HP
“IBM encourages more industry endorsement of mixed-source solutions that promote open standards. Microsoft support for interoperability with the industry-standard OpenDocument Format is most welcome. Open documents give customers choice and help unlock broad industry creativity, allowing access to a new generation of innovative applications. Our view continues to be that interoperability and choice are key values that customers demand and deserve.”
— Steve Mills, Senior Vice President and Group Executive, IBM Software
“We are pleased to see that Novell and Microsoft have come together to address customer needs with heterogeneous operating environments. As an industry leader in the IT market, we are excited to see the technology investments being made around virtualization and interoperability by both companies with this agreement.”
— Kevin Kettler, CTO, Dell Inc.
“SAP has been the first enterprise application vendor to run our apps on Linux, while we have more Windows-based deployments than any other platform. Today’s announcement means that customers can now choose their preferred operating system for each part of their SAP implementation with the confidence that the systems will have strong interoperability and be supported by SAP, Novell and Microsoft — both companies being strong SAP partners.”
— Shai Agassi, President of Product and Technology, SAP
“One of the key challenges in government is IT interoperability. We commend Microsoft and Novell for their collaboration and their efforts to build bridges in the interoperability area, which will help government to better serve our customers, our business community and our citizens.”
— Thomas Jarrett, Secretary of the Department of Technology and CIO, the State of Delaware
“Today’s announcement by Microsoft and Novell marks a significant milestone in the adoption of Linux. By choosing a course of co-opetition, Microsoft acknowledges the critical role that open source plays today in an enterprise IT infrastructure. We appreciate the role Novell is playing to help bridge the gap between Microsoft and the open source community. We are glad to see these two companies collaborating to further diminish the legal threat posed to developers and customers by patent assertions. This is good for customer confidence in Linux, the open source community and the broader IT ecosystem.”
— Stuart Cohen, CEO, Open Source Development Labs
“ With the agreement, I believe Novell and Microsoft are putting their customers first, as it should be, and this is positive news. This agreement makes me feel even more confident in my decision to adopt a mix of open source and proprietary source code in our environment. Most people who are in my position just want to deploy our technologies and applications on the most appropriate kernels and have everything interoperate at the most optimal level possible. This agreement will foster that reality.
— Tom Lockhart, IT Systems Manager, Hastings & Prince Edward Counties Health Unit