{"id":834,"date":"2007-07-09T15:24:13","date_gmt":"2007-07-09T14:24:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2007\/07\/the-microsoft-novell-alliance-good-bad-or-ugly.htm"},"modified":"2007-07-09T15:26:27","modified_gmt":"2007-07-09T14:26:27","slug":"the-microsoft-novell-alliance-good-bad-or-ugly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2007\/07\/the-microsoft-novell-alliance-good-bad-or-ugly.htm","title":{"rendered":"The Microsoft-Novell alliance – good, bad or ugly?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few weeks back, I attended a Novell webcast about last year’s Novell-Microsoft collaboration agreement<\/a>. Although that particular event was for partners, I’ve since found that the same presentation is available to a wider audience<\/a> so I’m not breaching any NDAs by writing a bit more here about what this is all about.<\/p>\n

We live in a heterogeneous world; most of the world’s data centres run a combination of mainframe operating systems, Unix, Windows and Linux. As commodity server hardware takes hold, many organisations previously running Unix-derived operating systems are starting to look at Linux (what Novell don’t say is that many won’t consider running Linux because of concerns about the supportability of open source software). Clearly a move from Unix to Linux is easier than a move to Windows, so (according to Novell), Microsoft has taken the pragmatic approach and partnered with Novell, who claim that SUSE Enterprise Linux is more prevalent in data centres than Rad Hat – the number one Linux distribution (I’m sure that Microsoft would argue that Windows Server 2003 and 2008 include better integration with and application support for Unix-like operating systems).<\/p>\n

The Novell-Microsoft collaboration agreement focuses on three technology areas:<\/p>\n