With reports claiming that Novell is on the verge of being sold off in pieces, one of the likely buyers has emerged as VMware, which is said to be a likely purchaser of Novell’s SUSE Linux business.
So what would VMware — whose virtualization offerings have been key in divorcing hardware from the operating system — want with an OS of its own? Plenty, according to industry observers.
For starters, take a close look at the work that the two companies are already undertaking together. And then there’s the state of the competition: Think Microsoft, with Hyper-V and Windows, and in the Linux realm, Red Hat, with KVM and RHEL. ServerWatch has the story.
At its VMworld trade show two weeks show, VMware CEO Paul Maritz disparaged the operating system, noting that it is being shunted aside as, “one of the implications is that more and more, traditional operating systems no longer see the hardware.”
This is hardly a revelation. Maritz has been talking smack about the operating system for nearly as long as he’s been CEO of VMware.
Why then, was the rumor mill in overdrive that VMware (NYSE: VMW) is about to swoop in like a vulture and pick SUSE Linux off of Novell’s rotting carcass? (Rumors that were proven true as this article was being posted.)