Novell Update: New investments to expand partnership
As this is my primary interoperability project these days, I thought I would provide some insight into our latest announcement with Novell from earlier this morning (see presspass article here). The first nineteen months of our partnership have yielded some excellent results in terms of IP collaboration, interoperability and - summarily - solving customer challenges that stem from integrating mixed Windows and Linux environments. You may recall that the initial partnership scope included a groundbreaking intellectual property agreement that led to technical collaboration for virtualization, systems management, federated identity, and document format interoperability. We have since added projects that address usability and have supported Novell's development of a Silverlight plug-in for Linux known as Moonlight. To round things out, we have also established a lab in Cambridge, MA where we manage test/dev programs jointly. Adding to the momentum, we announced earlier today, an incremental investment by both companies - programs, tools, and resources from Novell and up to $100MM in incremental certificate investment by Microsoft - which serve as an expansion of the original partnership agreement announced in 2006. The expansion, quite simply, is in response to significant customer interest in the work we are doing and it provides a foundation for Novell to directly augment the customer support side of the partnership. As noted in the announcement, we will spend the next several months working closely with customers to define tools, training, and support with a formal program launch targeted for November.
What I like to highlight about this partnership, which is reflected directly in our latest program expansion, is that it exemplifies a customer-centric and pragmatic approach to interoperability. Our companies innovate differently, monetize products and services differently, and continue to compete on a global scale. We are also, however, able to look at the market and understand the challenges that some of our customers are facing with mixed environments. Through this lens, specifically, we have found an opportunity to work together, build a groundbreaking IP relationship, and solve some of our customers' key IT challenges in the data center.
For more information about the Microsoft-Novell partnership, please visit: http://www.moreinterop.com.
