It has been seven weeks since Novell and
Microsoft announced their interoperability and patent protection deal.
This week the companies revealed the first fruits of that pact and with them
the first big-name staff defection.
Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank
and AIG Technologies will be receiving SUSE Linux Enterprise
subscription certificates from Microsoft. As part of the deal,
Microsoft acquired 70,000 certificates for SUSE Linux Enterprise.
As
revealed in a November
SEC filing made by Novell the value of those certificates to Novell
totals $240 million. To date, Novell claims that more than 16,000
certificates for SUSE Linux Enterprise have been activated.
“For us, interoperability is key,” said Tom Sanzone, CIO of Credit Suisse, in a statement. “We see both Windows and SUSE Linux
as strategic platforms going forward, and we’re very pleased to see
Microsoft and Novell, who support these platforms, step up and work on
interoperability. This is a great model because it provides a bridge to
connect the open source and proprietary software to benefit customers.”
But the reactions to the deal haven’t been all positive despite the fact that a Novell-Microsoft-sponsored study of 201
IT professionals found, not surprisingly, that over 90 percent approved of the deal.
For starters, the open source community greeted it with much skepticism and animosity from the beginning, with one of the loudest voices of protest
coming from within Novell’s own Samba developer ranks. Samba is an open source
component of most Linux distributions that enables file and printer sharing
between Windows and Linux hosts. Its use is explicitly covered and protected
under the terms of the Microsoft-Novell pact.
Samba developers,
including Novell employee Jeremy Allison, issued an open letter denouncing
the Novell-Microsoft patent agreement as being divisive. Allison is now
resigning from Novell in protest and heading to work for Google in 2007.
Allison is also well known in the Linux community for being the host of the
annual Golden Penguin Bowl at the LinuxWorld conference.
And Red Hat , Novell’s main competitor in the Linux space, remains unfazed by Novell’s claims.
Yesterday Red Hat reported
third-quarter earnings that beat the consensus analysis estimates with
earnings of 14 cents a share and showing new subscription growth in the
quarter. Red Hat reported that it had signed up 12,000 new customers in
the quarter for a total of 32,000 net new customers years to date.
In an after-market conference call, Red Hat CEO
Matthew Szulik applauded the loyalty that Red Hat customers have shown
Red Hat, especially in the face of competitive threats from Novell and Oracle.
In response to a question, Szulik knocked the Novell-Microsoft
announcement of the three customer wins.
“Those were existing accounts,” Szulik said in regards to Novell’s
announcement about wins with Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank and AIG
Technologies. “They were older engagements and we were not involved in
competitive situations.”
Novell released its SUSE Linux
Enterprise 10 distribution earlier this year and isn’t expected to
update it until 2007. Red Hat, however, didn’t release a version update to its
Red Hat Enterprise Linux in 2006 but is expected to release RHEL 5 in early
2007. RHEL 5 is
currently in beta.
