Brent Phillips - Interoperability Blog : Novell

Interop Roadshow Series

brentphillips — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 07:05:00 GMT

Over the past few months, I, and several colleagues, hosted a number of CIO roundtables around the country for the Microsoft-Novell interoperability partnership. Here’s a video clip we pulled together…I’ve posted a full set over at our youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/moreinterop. Check out audience comments - great feedback!

Virtualization with Hyper-V and Platespin

brentphillips — Sat, 09 May 2009 19:51:00 GMT

Upcoming eSeminar from Ziff Davis featuring Microsoft and Novell. Register here - http://www.eseminarslive.com/c/a/Virtualization/Microsoft052709/

moonlight 1.0

brentphillips — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 03:32:00 GMT

The much awaited Silverlight plug-in for Linux (aka 'Moonlight') operating systems was released by Novell yesterday. Read the MSN article here, see the press release here, and finally - if applicable - download the plug-in here.

dell.com/interop

brentphillips — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 19:23:00 GMT

I'm excited to share that Dell just launched their solutions portal for hardware and service offerings that support the Microsoft-Novell Interoperability partnership. Briefly, as part of Dell's own efforts to help customers reduce complexity and improve performance in the data center, customers can purchase a preconfigured Dell box that includes SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as an optimized guest on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. In today's economic climate, these are great tools to help customers more quickly realize efficiencies and reduce costs for their mixed environments. Please visit dell.com/interop to learn more.

Interop Events - Virtualization and Systems Management to drive Operational Efficiency and Reduce Costs

brentphillips — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 16:04:00 GMT

If you're in the Tampa, FL, Dallas, TX or Chapel Hill, NC areas we want to bring this to your attention. My team is hosting an interop event with Novell focused on mixed-source virtualization and systems management. The emphasis is how to leverage our projects to reduce costs and complexity in the data center. If you have a mixed environment and want to drive greater efficiency between your Windows and Linux estates please register. We have limited seating! For more information, visit the Ziff Davis Events Site.

Tampa, Florida - February 4 at the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts
Dallas, Texas - February 17 at the Cima Club
Chapel Hill, NC - February 25 at the Moorehead Planetarium

Novell: 2nd Year Anniversary Interop Write Up

brentphillips — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 20:20:00 GMT

Happy new year everyone! A quick cross-link over to Microsoft's interop site for a summary write up of our 2 year anniversary. It's a quick read and great reference if anyone wants to know more about our progress to date. We've embedded an overview video as well (warning 10 minutes), but also a great reference. Link here: http://www.microsoft.com/interop/featured/mncta.aspx.

Novell: 2nd year anniversary announcement and webinar

brentphillips — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 07:32:00 GMT

Following my last post, we're hosting another Ziff webinar tomorrow at 11:00 AM EST. Drop in if you can. I'm going to present with Josh Dorfman from Novell to discuss progress of the partnership as well as some new initiatives that were noted this morning in our two year anniversary announcement. The webinar is entitled Customer Success through a Groundbreaking Partnership and you can register for it here: http://www.eseminarslive.com/c/a/Infrastructure/Microsoft112008/.

Our 2nd anniversary press release can be found here. As a preview, we're releasing the first beta Moonlight download soon (SIlverlight plug-ins for Linux) as well as advanced management packs for SUSE Linux Enterprise for System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 to extend Linux monitoring capabilities.

Webcast: data center agility through mixed source virtualization

brentphillips — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 17:33:00 GMT

For those of you interested in heterogeneous virtualization between Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell, I am posting a registration link for an 'on demand' audiocast we produced yesterday morning. Our presenters, Jose Thomas from Microsoft and Frank Rego from Novell walk through the results of our collaboration on hypervisor interoperability and discuss how to address mixed-source virtualization scenarios in the data center.

http://www.eseminarslive.com/c/a/Linux-and-Open-Source/Microsoft102908/

Novell Update: Partners leverage virtualization solutions

brentphillips — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 04:33:00 GMT

Yesterday, Microsoft and Novell announced another milestone for their interoperability partnership that dovetailed with Microsoft's Hyper-V launch on September 8th. In short, we are making available, through partners, a combined offering with SUSE Linux as an optimized guest on Hyper-V. The technical solution maximizes choice for customers seeking to virtualize mixed environments with Windows and SUSE Linux. The offering announced today enables partners - who had worked independently with Microsoft and Novell - to directly participate in the collaboration by combining a mix of hardware, services, and support directly to their customers. Press pass here: http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2008/sep08/09-10MixedSourcePR.mspx. In the coming weeks look for information about hands-on lab engagements sponsored by Microsoft and Novell. I will post updates here or you can visit our partnership website at moreinterop.com. Likewise, check out our landing page and virtualization demo at moreinterop.com/hyperv.

Novell Update: New investments to expand partnership

brentphillips — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 14:58:00 GMT

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.

Guten Tag from Cebit 2008

brentphillips — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 04:45:00 GMT

Wow, what a show!! I I attended the event as a guest of Novell to promote our work around interoperability. I had hoped to post sooner but we were extremely busy all week. To summarize, the interoperability partnership was a major driver at Novell's booth, especially the work we are doing around virtualization. We recieved a great deal of questions and were met with tremendous enthusiasm as we walked people through our strategy. Our demonstration was particulary well recieved showing Windows Server 2008 hosting SUSE Linux Enterprise server. We also highlighted the document translators in OpenOffice for the OpenXML file format, walking visitors through a seamless authoring experiece between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice 2.0. I think people are still shocked and amazed (positively, of course) when they hear our story and see that we are actually producing results. We had a great time walking visitors through our progress to date. For more information visit http://www.moreinterop.com.

Here is the CEBIT 2008 opening day with Steve Ballmer using the new Surface technology...

Microsoft and Novell Celebrate one year of progress and bring accessibility to the forefront of collaboration

brentphillips — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 15:26:00 GMT

I volunteered at a local hospice for a few years while I was in school. During that time, in addition to some administrative support at the main office, I spent a significant amount of time with a young teenager who had been diagnosed with Duchenne ’s muscular dystrophy. The young man with whom I spent time had been diagnosed with the disease in early childhood and - at the time of our first meeting - was bed-ridden and could only move his fingers. Aside from visits from me, spending time with his family, and watching TV – the remainder of his time was spent on the computer by way of a trackball mouse and special voice recognition technology.

What strikes me, when I think back about it, is that his use of the computer was probably the only autonomy and freedom he had. Any other activity - at all - was dependent on someone else. At that time, the Internet was still young by consumer standards and multimedia PC’s were just blooming. He was thrilled! Chat rooms, surfing the web, games, and email became a great past-time for him. I am happy that he had that freedom and I cannot stress how important technology was for improving his quality of life.

Now it goes without saying that technology improves everyone’s quality of life to some degree, but for those who have limitations for whatever reason – immobility, blindness, hearing loss – technology can be life changing. The challenge these days – as computing has become truly ubiquitous yet more complex – is how to offer consistent and predictable experiences across form factors for those who are impaired.

Enter the latest collaboration between Microsoft and Novell: The User Interface Automation specification (details here). In short, Microsoft is releasing the specification to the technical community while working with Novell to improve cross-platform accessibility experiences. We’re already hearing positive feedback from the community, including the National Federation for the Blind, and look forward to a fruitful collaboration. After one year of working together, this announcement marks the sixth unique project that we are working on together to address our customers’ interoperability needs.

I am amazed to think about the progress we have made in such a short period of time.

As always, check out http://www.moreinterop.com for details.

For more on this announcement, see Microsoft’s presspass article here.