Johannesburg, 27 May 2004
"We are walking the talk, fulfilling the promises we made a year ago," said Ed Anderson, VP for Novell Platform Services Group, at the opening of Novell`s Brainshare conference in Sandton yesterday.
Anderson identified open source as a disruptive technology. "It is disruptive to the traditional way of developing software. Novell sees this in a pragmatic way - we decided to embrace open source and become part of it rather than a victim of it. "
At Brainshare last May, Novell announced that its flagship NetWare software will offer a choice between a NetWare or a Linux kernel. Faced with a waning NetWare customer base, which accounts for around 40% of its revenues, Novell bet that embracing Linux would help it enter previously closed environments.
In the past year, Novell has made two Linux acquisitions - Ximian in August, followed in November by the more high profile acquisition of Suse, the second largest Linux distribution worldwide. The moves were welcomed for raising the profile of the open source community. According to Gartner, Suse provides Novell "with a popular and well-endowed Linux server version for the enterprise, as well as a capable desktop system, making Novell a key player in the Linux market".
Anderson says Novell has made "dramatic moves to make Linux more mainstream in the enterprise", relying on its strong enterprise customer base and its "global ecosystem".
"It`s about giving customers choice, taking control back from proprietary software vendors to customers."
Anderson says Novell has focused on customer needs. "We have developed 'listening tools` to help us hear what customers say and enable that real customer feedback flows to the developers and engineers."
The promise to offer NetWare customers the choice to deploy either the NetWare or the Linux kernel was delivered in the Nterprise Linux Service 2.0 offering in December 2003.
Anderson says Novell has now decided to accelerate the delivery of the combined NetWare/Linux offering - it will have to be ready within one year rather than the originally set three-year time frame.
Anderson addressed Novell`s motives for embracing open source. "The question is: who is going to benefit more from the relationship - Novell or the open source movement? We are making sure that we give back more than we take."
One way of giving back is to "open-source" proprietary technology, says Anderson.
"Two key technologies that were proprietary - Novell`s file sharing tool iFolder and Suse`s configuration tool for the Linux platform, YaST (Yet Another Setup Toolkit), have been made available as open source."
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