Microsoft and Novell announced a broad collaborative effort that puts customers first. It includes a set of three agreements: broad business and technical collaboration agreements to build, market, and support a series of new solutions to make Novell and Microsoft products work better together for customers, and a patent agreement that provides each company’s customers with patent coverage for their respective products.
Customer demand coupled with common business interests between Microsoft and Novell made this deal happen. This agreement comes on the heels of Oracle announcing worldwide customer support services for RedHat Linux. The Linux world now has the attention of the largest software companies because their customers are using it, and it makes good business sense to support it.
Customers have been using Linux and Windows for years, but typically on separate servers, and for very different tasks. It is now quite common for a customer to choose Windows to run a CRM or production management system, and choose Linux to run a print server, file server, or a rapidly changing environment.
What has changed is that now customers are using virtualization to better utilize their servers, and they now want to run Windows and Linux on the same server. Customers also wanted assurances that they would not be caught in the crossfire of patent infringement lawsuits between the vendors.
These customer requests caused Microsoft to look for a Linux partner who would work cooperatively to make interoperability successful, and recognize the IP rights of both companies. Novell has a long history as a commercial software company and has significant ownership and patents in the Unix and Linux space.
Microsoft has reached out to the Linux world and Open Software community.
- Microsoft announced an agreement with Zend to develop a high performance PHP runtime environment for Windows.
- SocialText announced SocialPoint, an open source based wiki environment for SharePoint
- Port25 is Microsoft's community site to communicate with the open source community.
- XenSource is working with Microsoft to ensure that Xen based open source works with Windows
- CodePlex - similar to Sourceforge, a new portal for source code sharing and collaborative software development. CodePlex has over 400 projects, 40 from Microsoft employees.
- JBoss interoperability work announced last year.
- Support for ODF and PDF file formats. ODF stands for Open Document Format.
Customer demand drives decisions at Microsoft. It is that simple. It is about what our customers request and what makes good business sense. Microsoft has millions of customers and they all have slightly different needs. But some issues clearly rise to the top, and those get addressed. You can never go wrong listening to your customers.
