Microsoft and Novell Announce Broad Collaboration on Windows and Linux Interoperability and Support

In a non usual agreement between Microsoft Corp. and Novell Inc. announced last Thursday 02 November 2006 announcing a set of collaboration agreements on both the business and technical sides, to build market and support a series of new solutions to collaborate both Novell and Microsoft® products.

The business part of the agreement stated that both of the companies will pursue a variety of joint marketing activates. Where Microsoft will distribute as part of a resale arrangement approximately 70,000 coupons for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server maintenance and support per year so that customers can benefit from the use of the new software solutions developed through the collaborative research effort, as well as a version of Linux that is covered with respect to Microsoft’s intellectual property rights.

Under the technical collaboration agreement, the companies will create a joint research facility and pursue new software solutions for virtualization, management and document format compatibility. These are potentially huge markets — IDC projects the overall market for virtual machine software to be more than $1.8 billion by 2009, and the overall market for distributed system management software to be $10.2 billion by 2010 — and the companies believe their investment in interoperability will make their respective products more attractive to customers.

“As CEO of Microsoft, I certainly recognize that Linux plays an important role in the IT infrastructure of many of our customers, and will continue to play an important role. We have customers who use a mix of technologies to manage their businesses, and they demand strong interoperability amongst all their systems.” Steve Ballmer – CEO – Microsoft

“In terms of business cooperation from Microsoft's perspective, we definitely want those customers who are combining Windows and Linux to choose the Novell SUSE product line. And we're going to put our marketing behind that.” Steve Ballmer – CEO – Microsoft