Novell swears Open Source, digs at MS

Iishwar Daas Nair

UTAH: As the snow melts from the mountain peaks in Utah, the state's largest technology company, Novell Inc. gets ready for a busy year ahead. The company's annual conference - BrainShare 2004 saw renewed interest with over 6,000 participants, one-third more than last year. The reason being that, Novell's acquisitions of SuSE and Ximian in 2003 signals its entry into the enterprise Linux distribution and services market and in 2004, the strategy of company is expected to play out.

"Novell is back," said chairman and CEO of Novell Jack Messman pumping his fists, concluding his keynote address at BrainShare 2004. He had further good news to share after delivering on the promises made last year to embrace the open source world. Messman announced the convergence of SUSE Linux and NetWare in a new product family called Novell Open Enterprise Server (OES), to be released in December 2004, a full year ahead of schedule.

"OES will deliver networking capabilities associated with NetWare platform and the company's newly acquired SUSE Linux and Ximian offerings to provide all components necessary to establish a manageable, low-cost infrastructure for hosting mission critical networking services," said Novell Inc. vice chairman Chris Stone.

The product is intended to give customers the choice to move over to Linux even as they continue under NetWare upgrade protection and maintenance agreements. Apart from the choice customers can make, the management tools across the system would be common, company officials said.

Novell sees 2004 as the year when large scale Linux adoption both in the enterprise server and desktop space. The keynote sessions were peppered with digs at Microsoft and is set to challenge Microsoft even in the desktop area. Red Hat, the largest Linux distribution vendor, is the other target. "Clearly, we want to be the No.1 in Linux market too," said Messman.

The acquisitions, the announcements of roadmaps of various product families and the announcement of OES- taken together presents a new market opportunity to Novell. Traditionally, seen as a product and engineering focused company, Messman announced a reversal. He said, "We are turning customer backward from being lab forward - that is, learning from customers what they want rather than finding customers for the products that the lab produces".

The management teams have also been reportedly regrouped and new customer management methodologies have been put in place to deliver this strategy.

To articulate its claim to the Linux market, the BrainShare keynote had a guest none other than Linus Torvalds, the progenitor of Linux, whose presence was kept a surprise till he was called for a short tete-a-tete. Torvalds was his usual geeky self. He revealed that he was working on a new Linux kernel and expected that the focus of Linux for the next few years will be the desktop.

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