Microsoft, Novell say alliance still bearing fruit (ComputerWorld) [LWN.net]

Eric Lai takes a look at the Novell/Microsoft alliance after three years. "For Novell, the alliance has been a particular boon. Revenue related to SUSE Enterprise Linux is up 50% year over year, said Susan Heystee, vice-president and general manager for global strategic alliances at Novell. Most of that comes from $225 million in SUSE support vouchers purchased and sold by Microsoft to customers running both Windows Server and SUSE Linux."

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Microsoft, Novell say alliance still bearing fruit (ComputerWorld)

Posted Nov 11, 2009 0:36 UTC (Wed) by DDevine (guest, #60717) [Link]

That's funny, 'cause didn't Microsoft say about 6 months ago that they haven't sold any Novell licenses?

Microsoft, Novell say alliance still bearing fruit (ComputerWorld)

Posted Nov 11, 2009 2:26 UTC (Wed) by Ed_L. (guest, #24287) [Link]

Well, Microsoft would say that, wouldn't they? I don't know about SuSE Enterprise Server, but RHEL 5.4 includes a GCC 4.4.0 preview (GPLv3), and I doubt Enterprise SuSE can remain much behind...

Who are these people?

Posted Nov 11, 2009 10:53 UTC (Wed) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]

It would be good to know a few more details about who these customers are, what they are running on their Windows and Linux boxes, and what would help them to move more things onto Linux. At a guess, I'd say they have databases and server software on Linux, while Exchange and other crap like SharePoint runs on the Windows machine.

Who are these people?

Posted Nov 11, 2009 14:48 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Yes..

Generally I think that you'd run external services and your database stuff
on Linux while all the desktop support oriented things like Exchange, Active
Directory, and Sharepoint would run on Windows server.

If you ever looked at the effort and expertise it takes to setup Active
Directory on Windows vs equivalent on Linux it's pretty obvious that most
businesses would be stupid to switch to a regular Linux distro. (equivalent
being: LDAP, Kerberos, desktop configuration management system compatible
with Windows, administrative tools regular folks can use (for example having
H.R. person remove user's rights), etc etc) It's much too expensive and time
consuming to setup and troubleshoot as well as massive lack of experience
supporting such a configuration available on the job market.

Who are these people?

Posted Nov 14, 2009 17:27 UTC (Sat) by pspinler (subscriber, #2922) [Link]

That has, in fact, been the case. Fortunately, it's getting better. There's projects out there to combine all these services in seamless fashion with nicer admin interfaces. For example, FreeIPA, or it's commercial cousin Redhat IPA.

-- Pat