REDMOND, Wash., and WALTHAM, Mass., 7 November 2006 — Microsoft Corp. and Novell Inc. have introduced a set of broad business and technical collaboration agreements to build, market and support a series of new solutions to make Novell and Microsoft products work better together. The two companies also announced an agreement to provide each other’s customers with patent coverage for their respective products. These agreements will be in place until at least 2012. Under this new model, customers will realize new levels of choice and flexibility through improved interoperability and manageability between Windows and Linux.
“They said it couldn’t be done. This is a new model and a true evolution of our relationship that we think customers will immediately find compelling because it delivers practical value by bringing two of their most important platform investments closer together,” said Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft. “We’re excited to work with Novell, whose strengths include its heritage as a mixed-source company. Resolving our patent issues enables a combined focus on virtualization and web services management to create new opportunities for our companies and our customers.”
Under the agreement, Novell is establishing clear leadership among Linux platform and open source software providers on interoperability for mixed-source environments. As a result, Microsoft will officially recommend SUSE Linux Enterprise for customers who want Windows and Linux solutions. Additionally, Microsoft will distribute 70,000 coupons for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server maintenance and support, so that customers can benefit from the use of an interoperable version of Linux with patent coverage as well as the collaborative work between the two companies.
“Too often technology companies ask their customers to adapt to them. Today we are adapting to our customers,” said Ron Hovsepian, president and CEO of Novell. “Microsoft and Novell are enabling customers to take advantage of each other’s products where it makes sense in their enterprise infrastructure. We jointly believe that our business and patent agreements make it possible to offer the highest level of interoperability with the assurance that both our companies stand behind these solutions.”
The two companies will create a joint research facility at which Microsoft and Novell technical experts will architect and test new software solutions and work with customers and the community to 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 revenue 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 Microsoft and Novell believe their investment in interoperability will make their respective products more attractive to customers.
The agreement between Microsoft and Novell focuses on three technical areas:
• Virtualization: Microsoft and Novell will jointly develop a virtualization offering for Linux and Windows.
• Web services for managing physical and virtual servers: Microsoft and Novell will undertake work to make it easier for customers to manage mixed Windows and SUSE Linux Enterprise environments and to make it easier for customers to federate Microsoft Active Directory with Novell eDirectory.
• Document format compatibility: The two companies will work together on ways for OpenOffice and Microsoft Office system users to best share documents, and both will take steps to make translators available to improve interoperability between Open XML and OpenDocument formats.
“As a result of this collaboration, customers will now be able to run virtualized Linux on Windows or virtualized Windows on Linux,” said Jeff Jaffe, executive vice president and CTO, Novell. “Customers continually ask us how they can consolidate servers with multiple operating systems through virtualization. By working together, Novell and Microsoft enable customers to choose the operating system that best fits their application and business needs.”
The patent cooperation agreement will give Microsoft and Novell’s customers assurance of protection against patent infringement claims. Customers will have confidence that the technologies they use and deploy in their environments are compliant with the two companies’ patents. As part of this agreement, Microsoft will provide a covenant not to assert its patent rights against customers who have purchased SUSE Linux Enterprise Server or other covered products from Novell, and Novell will provide an identical covenant to customers who have a licensed version of Windows or other covered products from Microsoft. Customer and partner reaction to the agreements has generally been good and Novell noted that in addition, one of their priorities in working toward the agreement with Microsoft, was making sure the deal made sense for the open source community. As part of deal, Novell and Microsoft have announced three important commitments. First, Microsoft will work with Novell and actively contribute to several open source software projects, including projects focused on Office file formats and web services management. Second, Microsoft will not assert its patents against individual noncommercial open source developers. And third, Microsoft is promising not to assert its patents against individual contributors to OpenSUSE.org whose code is included in the SUSE Linux Enterprise platform, including SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop.
“Today’s announcement by Microsoft and Novell marks a significant milestone in the adoption of Linux,” said Stuart Cohen, CEO of Open Source Development Labs. “By choosing a course of co-opetition, Microsoft acknowledges the critical role that open source plays today in an enterprise IT infrastructure. We appreciate the role Novell is playing to help bridge the gap between Microsoft and the open source community. We are glad to see these two companies collaborating to further diminish the legal threat posed to developers and customers by patent assertions. This is good for customer confidence in Linux, the open source community and the broader IT ecosystem.”
