Customers of Novell-Microsoft partnership pass 200 in second year
Microsoft and open-source victualler Novell are marking the second full year of their interoperability partnership, which surprised more in the software industry when it was announced Nov. 2, 2006. “This is almost like the lion and the lamb laying down together,” analyst Laura DiDio told me at the time.
Susan Heystee, general manager of global partnerships for Novell, related earlier today that the companies have landed again than 200 joint customers, up from 70 about the first year of the pact.
“They appreciate the fact that we’re at the table together, working with them, listening to their of necessity around interoperability,” she said.
In 2006, the longtime antagonists in the market and in court announced they would stir up each others’ enterprise server products to customers running “heterogeneous” IT systems — those with a combination of Microsoft and open-source software.
Microsoft pledged to distribute 70,000 coupons for subsistence and service of Novell’sitting SUSE Linux.
The companies also forged an intellectual-property agreement that protects eddish. individual’s customers and more open-source software developers from patent-infringement suits. Microsoft also made a related upfront payment to Novell.
They also began joint development of software with an emphasis on virtualization, management of Web services and open-document formats.
Results of that evolution work announced today include a management tool that will allow IT workers to monitor Windows and Linux servers from the like console. The tool is due in the first half of 2009.
Also, a beta interpretation of Moonlight, an open-source version of Microsoft’s new Web video and rich internet application platform Silverlight, faculty of volition have existence to be turned to account imminently, said Sanjay Sidhu, a Microsoft superintendent of marketing and business development for the partnership. Moonlight will have the features of Silverlight 1, which has already been replaced by Silverlight 2.
Heystee aforesaid work in continuance a translation of Moonlight that will match Silverlight 2’s features is already started.
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