UNC Linux Users Group

["David B. Rankin" <david.rankin AT unc.edu>]

Related to the SuSE/IBM/Novell questions at the Linux meeting...

NewsForge
The Online Newspaper for Linux and Open Source
http://www.newsforge.com/
Title           Novell and IBM team on Linux tour
Date            2003.12.11 12:00
Author          warthawg
Topic           Linux
http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=03/12/11/0026218

Since November 6th, Novell and IBM have been touring the country 
together doing a dog-and-pony show about how they work together and 
separately to bring their customers the best -- especially the best as 
that relates to Linux. I was present at the 41st stop on that tour 
yesterday in Austin, Texas. This is a brief report on the message they 
are delivering.

About 50 attendees -- not including those from the host companies -- 
were at the Holiday Inn not far from the IBM campuses in North Austin 
yesterday. Chatting with a few of them before the session got underway, 
I learned that some had come up from Houston, which is about 200 miles 
southeast. Most of the folks attending are current Novell customers, 
though a lot of them had some familiarity with Linux as well. The talks 
were definitely aimed at current Novell users, perhaps to explain what 
the company's recent acquisitions in the Linux arena mean to them.

I don't know if IBM and Novell both still sell Netware, but in the old 
days they did: IBM in a blue box and Novell in a red box. The qualifying 
question at the start of a support call to either was what color box did 
you buy. If not the right color, you were given the phone number of the 
other company's support line. The two firms have a similar relationship 
today in regards to Linux. There are areas where their product offerings 
and support dovetail neatly, and other areas where they overlap. Using 
the term attributed to Novell's first CEO, Ray Noorda, it is an example 
of "coopetiton."

In the red box

Wade Tongen handled the presentation chores for Novell. Mike Persell did 
the same for IBM. They took turns before the group as they shared the 
two and a half hours pretty equally.

There were more than a few comparisons made between Linux and Windows 
during the morning, from both the red team and the blue team. Tongen 
pointed out how Microsoft customers had no choice other than to deal 
with Microsoft. With Linux, he explained, there are a number of vendors 
that customers can talk to to find the one best willing and able to work 
with them.

Mono was more important in the Novell purchase of Ximian earlier this 
year than I realized. It lines up nicely to give Novell an Linux 
equivalent for its Director-AppServer and Composer-DirXMAL .Net 
offerings. Novell is not interested in getting into religious wars 
between proprietary and open source camps. It simply wants to provide 
customers with choices.

Novell is not interested in getting involved with the KDE vs. Gnome 
wars, either. It is working hard in the SuSE purchase to ensure that KDE 
continues to thrive and be a vital part of the Linux landscape.

Novell was not exactly a Linux "newbie" on the day it purchased SuSE. 
Before the buy (actually, the buy will not be finalized for probably 
another 30 days) 600 of Novell's 1,200 support people held at least LPI 
1 certification, and 200 held LPI 2 certification. Novell is setting up 
its own Linux certification program for Certified Linux Engineers (CLEs).

There is overlap between Novell's ZENWorks and Ximian's Red Carpet. A 
single person from Ximian is assigned the responsibility of taking the 
best from each to move forward with a single software management tool.

Novell will offer all its services in the short term (the next couple of 
years) on both Netware and Linux. Beyond that, they can't say if Netware 
will survive. From a business point of view, it would be better to 
support only one, and a big part of the value of the SuSE purchase would 
be to cut costs in having one. That's a lesson that IBM seems to have 
learned.

In the blue box

Mike Persell took over to bring IBM's story to the fore. He is part of 
IBM's Linux Impact Team, which helps IBM internally and IBM customers to 
absorb Linux technology. Persell estimates that about 7,500 folks at IBM 
have Linux somewhere in their job titles. He also told us that IBM has 
15,000 Linux desktops running internally. Its choice of management tool 
for that desktop? What a coincidence. It's Ximian's Red Carpet.

Persell said IBM has found software management costs to be 10% lower 
with Linux than with AIX. But that's not all. Software management costs 
with Linux are from 20% to 40% less than with Windows. That's a nice delta.

How pervasive is Linux within IBM? Persell said that if you see the 
eServer label on a black box, that means it runs Linux, regardless of 
the architecture inside the box. He also commented on the fact that AMDs 
processors have IBM rethinking the X86 marketplace and what can be done 
there -- especially the 64-bit Opteron. It has a lot of folks at IBM 
busy removing Intel from slides and replacing it with the generic X86.

It seemed Persell's biggest two points about IBM's embracing of Linux 
and open source were these: on one hand it's all about open standards, 
and on the other it's about IBM giving customers what they want most, a 
single "throat to choke."

Links

   1. "coopetiton" - http://www.quinion.com/words/turnsofphrase/tp-coo2.htm
   2. "CLEs" - http://www.novell.com/training/certinfo/cle/index.html
   3. "ZENWorks" - http://www.novell.com/products/zenworks/
   4. "Opteron" - 
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInformation/0,,30_118_8825,00.html


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printed from NewsForge, Novell and IBM team on Linux tour on 2003-12-15 
16:41:09

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David B. Rankin, CCNA, MCSE, CNE
Associate Director of Distributed Computing
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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