Thanks for your comment. Clearly, Red Hat would need to be involved in any initiative of this nature to make it successful. Most of the big ISVs already port to Red Hat and SUSE Linux Enterprise, so we don't really see this as a competitive issue vis-a-vis Red Hat. Instead, we want to make it so any application developer just has to certify once and run on multiple Linux distributions. We think it's important to keep the Linux marketing from fragmenting like Unix did. So we think it's worth the effort. Our conversations continue with the key players in the industry, so we hope this idea takes root.

On your questions on virtualization, SAP, etc. SUSE Linux Enterprise is already certified on SAP. In fact, SAP has made SUSE Linux Enterprise their preferred Linux distribution: see this announcement we made with SAP in May this year – http://www.novell.com/news/press/sap-and-novell-deliver-expanded-linux-support-options-for-customers
I won't comment on Swiss Telecom's motiviations. Needless to say, we felt Xen was ready for enterprise use when we put it into our distribution last year. We've got big customers – Sumitomo Electric, BMW, and, now, Casio, who've gone public about their Xen deployments.

We have lots of materials on our website about why we think SUSE Linux Enterprise beats the competition. You can find a specific comparison to Red Hat here: http://www.novell.com/linux/compare.html?tab=1 That leads to other materials, including white papers. I hope this helps. Thanks!

One of Ron's subjects dealt with a write-once-works-on-all-Linux-distros initiative to make Linux more attractive for ISV's. Would Red Hat have any interest in this initiative since many ISV's presumably would write for the Red Hat distro already ? It also sounds like this initiative would be a large effort — has there any interest in it to date ?

There also was an interesting article dealing with Virtualization wins for both Red Hat and Novell. The Red Hat win at Swiss Telecom took a shot at Novell saying that their Virtualization solution had been implemented prematurely. But it sounded like the key factors for the Swiss Telecom win were the Red Hat certification for SAP and also the Jboss middleware integration.

For Novell, the Casio win seems to have been due to the Windows interoperability capabilities.

Will Suse Linux be certified for SAP soon ? Any comments regarding the Swiss IT comments ?

Finally, does Novell have any websites or white papers which highlight some of the advantages of Suse Linux over Red Hat Linux ? From reading mostly Novell perspectives, it has always sounded like Novell was light years ahead of Red Hat with regards to the data center…

Thanks,
Gary