suse

Oracle and Novell Linux: Caught between a Red Hat and a CentOS

Novell has been positioning itself as the Avis of Linux, a distant but gaining Red Hat competitor that "tries harder." Like Oracle, Novell argues that it can give customers Red Hat value at a lower price.

There's just one problem with this marketing spin: the "low-cost alternative" to Red Hat isn't Novell. It's CentOS. And CentOS is free as in $0.00.

It's true that adoption of unpaid Linux like CentOS is booming, and that this no-cost alternative to more expensive solutions like Red Hat is a real threat to Red Hat. … Read more

Novell's Linux revenue soars 22 percent, while everything else tanks

Novell reported on Thursday a 22 percent year-over-year increase in its Linux revenue, topping $40 million. That's the good news. The bad news is that overall, net revenue slumped to $216 million from $245 million for the third fiscal quarter of 2008, with every product besides Linux dropping considerably. From identity and security management (down 16 percent) to systems and resource management (down 15 percent) to workgroup (down 12 percent), Novell is in serious trouble, with at least two potential options:

Turn to the open-source community or Microsoft to fix its failing businesses.

Novell's Open Platform business, of … Read more

Linux is booming, but unpaid adoption may hurt vendors

Even as the recession continues to cool CIO appetites for software purchases, Linux is bucking the trend, according to a new IDC report.

IDC is projecting Linux revenue to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 16.9 percent from 2008 to 2013, topping $1.2 billion in 2013.

As IDC notes, this growth will comprise just 4 percent of total software market revenue by 2013, up from 2.2 percent in 2008. However, for the second time, IDC has also examined nonpaid deployments of Linux, revealing some troubling data.

I've always assumed Red Hat's primary Linux … Read more

Novell makes Linux easy with SUSE Studio

Microsoft, for all its faults, has significantly lowered the bar to IT development, offering tools like Visual Studio that help make average developers more productive. Linux, on the contrary, has been supercharged with powerful capabilities, but has often required significant experience to harness that power.

Enter Novell's SUSE Studio Online, a cool new way to develop software and virtual appliances online. I wrote about SUSE Studio Online back in January 2009 when it was still in alpha stage, but Novell has now officially released this tool that "enables ISVs to customize a fully supported, mission-critical operating system and … Read more

Red Hat's Fedora 11: So easy you'll forget it's Linux

Red Hat has taken heat over the past few years for allegedly neglecting the personal computer in favor of more profitable enterprise servers. It's a fair critique: Red Hat is an enterprise software company, a decision it made years ago, and to good effect.

But anyone thinking that Red Hat has somehow forgotten consumer markets in its rush to win the enterprise need only try the final release of Fedora 11, its community-focused operating system for desktops and laptops. I've been evaluating Fedora 11 for the past week and find it polished and professional while meeting or beating … Read more

Linux vendors trumpet cost savings

While Microsoft has been advising open-source vendors not to focus on price as a primary competitive differentiator, the big Linux vendors--Red Hat, Novell (SUSE), and Canonical (Ubuntu)--apparently haven't received the memo. A quick look at their Web sites suggests that the Linux vendors want chief information officers to have their price tags top of mind.

Red Hat:

Novell:

Canonical:

And even Oracle, which usually doesn't paint itself as the low-cost leader, is making the pitch:

Microsoft's Windows Server revenue is down 29 percent. Meanwhile, Novell's and Red Hat's Linux businesses are thriving.

Maybe the … Read more

Novell, Sun, and Red Hat: Three degrees of open source

Red Hat is an open-source company, while Novell is not, as Novell's CEO and CFO both emphasized in Novell's most recent earnings call. Sun, for its part, was desperately trying to reinvent itself as an open-source company, but struggled to do so given the weight of its declining hardware businesses.

Only Red Hat has managed to thrive as an open-source company while achieving significant scale of revenues.

Open source, it turns out, proves to be a much easier business strategy for upstarts than incumbents: it's hard to thrive on open-source prices unless your business is architected from … Read more

Novell CEO sees SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 in the data center

SAN FRANCISCO--Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian kicked off Open Source Business Conference 2009 here on Tuesday, highlighting Linux momentum, even as the economy craters.

Despite some negative news in its recent earnings announcement, Novell's Linux business has been growing by roughly 30 percent every quarter.

Importantly, Hovsepian discussed innovations that Novell has released in SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 that make Linux the engine of a bold move into the data center and beyond.

Hovsepian highlighted some recent analysis from IDC suggesting that Linux and open-source software will continue to grow through the recession, but he emphasized that this growth isn'… Read more

Novell releases Suse Linux Enterprise 11

Novell on Tuesday released Suse Linux Enterprise 11, which includes for the first time a full runtime environment for Microsoft .Net applications.

The open-source company said the new version of the data center operating system shows improvements over its predecessors in terms of interoperability, mission-critical computing, and virtualization.

One of the key enhancements in Suse Linux Enterprise 11 is its Mono Extension. Mono is an open-source project that aims to create a .Net-compatible set of programming tools, including elements such as a C# compiler. According to Novell's product director for the EMEA region, Holger Dyroff, the addition of commercial … Read more