Novell News

Interesting comments today from Matt Szulik of Red Hat in CBR Online about Novell's move into the Linux arena. He described it as theater. Needless to say, we don't consider ourselves in the acting business. Competition is good for any sector, including open source. We made the SUSE acquisition because we felt we could bring our enterprise software expertise to the open source arena. And we're doing that.There's no question Red Hat has had first mover advantage, particularly in the U.S. But we've made major steps building out our ISV and IHV partnerships over the last year to match, and even surpass, Red Hat's. We've also put significant resources behind multiple projects in the open source arena Linux, OpenOffice, GNOME, KDE – as well as behind several projects we maintain Mono, openSUSE, and Hula. Unlike Red Hat, we've had an important constituency to address the millions of loyal Novell users who've entrusted their networks to us over the last 20 years. We've developed Open Enterprise Server with both a NetWare and Linux kernel to make sure our NetWare users can continue to leverage NetWare, if they so choose, or tap the power of Linux, while still leveraging the network services from Novell they know and love. We had $31 million in revenue last quarter from that product.It's a complex, heterogeneous world out there. Companies need vendors who can support mixed environments and provide solutions to manage and secure those environments. Novell is in this for the long haul, and we are confident our strategy is sound. If this is theater, we're still in the first act. The fat lady hasn't sung yet.