Novell News

by Joanna Rosenberg, ISV marketing manager

Novell continues to outpace Red Hat in an area that really matters to customers – the number of certified applications for our respective Linux platforms. A few months ago we announced SUSE Linux Enterprise had achieved double the number of certified applications (on recent releases) as Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Today we’ve achieved another milestone with more than 6,000 (6,246 to be exact) software applications fully-certified on the latest versions of SUSE Linux Enterprise.

Why are the number of certified applications important to customers and the industry? Not so long ago the big question IT organizations had about Linux was whether it would support their existing software applications. While the industry has acknowledged that Linux delivers significant benefits in the areas of performance, security and cost of ownership, a consideration has always remained for customers: Would their existing applications easily run on Linux?

For the past six years, Novell has focused on making sure the answer to that question is yes. By developing tools and programs to support ISVs, we have established the industry’s strongest Linux ecosystem. As Linux continues to make strides, the breadth and depth of application support for SUSE Linux Enterprise makes it the logical choice for end-users who require flexibility and versatility to deploy a variety of applications and workloads on different hardware and across virtual and cloud infrastructures.

Our ISV Software Catalog includes the most widely used enterprise software applications including system infrastructure products developed by IBM; database management systems and ERP and other business applications from Oracle and SAP; and security applications from leading vendors such as CA and Symantec.

Our strong focus on our ecosystem has helped us chip away at Red Hat’s share of the Linux market. Our lead in certified applications over Red Hat extends across a broad variety of application categories and vertical industries worldwide. If you can't find an application in our catalog that you would like to deploy in your own data center, please let us know as we routinely work with ISVs to port applications to our platform based on customer demand.

Partly as a result of this intense focus on our ISV ecosystem, SUSE Linux Enterprise is the fastest-growing Linux distribution, increasing its worldwide market share of Linux revenue by 5 points in the most recently reported year, while Red Hat lost 5 points. That's a 10 point share gain in one year!

We’re proud to see the results of the investments in our ISV ecosystem paying off. We’re pleased that we’ve strengthened our relationships with our ISV partners and that we are providing our customers with more ways to realize value from their investment in Novell.