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Why IBM wanted a piece of Novell's SuSE action

David Berlind CNET News

Published: 06 Nov 2003 16:20 GMT

Nugent went on to explain that the single code-base issue is critical for any company to succeed with the cross platform message. "Until you do this, you can't begin to say to the market that you're a cross-platform vendor," said Nugent. "We took the code that was tied closely to the operating system, we put it into common code base, and made it compilable for other operating systems. Prior management teams wanted to go the cross-platform course from multiple code bases. It's tough enough to maintain one code base for one operating system. But to maintain three for three or six for six? Now that we're on a single code base, we're in a much better position to deliver on the cross-platform promise."

Another reason the Novell executive team likes SuSE, Nugent continued, is because of SuSE's people. The SuSE team understands the same customer set that Novell targets: the enterprise. "They understand enterprises much better than Red Hat does," Nugent said. "As an example, SuSE wisely delayed the release of the next version of its enterprise-class Linux until version 2.6 of the Linux kernel comes out. So, the next release of SuSE's Enterprise Server will be version 9, which will come out in the spring or summer of next year. Meanwhile, Red Hat just announced its newest enterprise version of Linux -- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 -- and it will be based on version 2.4 of the kernel. They'll have to rev it again when version 2.6 of the kernel comes out and the last thing enterprises want is that kind of change."

I asked Nugent why, even if the distribution is not a commodity, it makes sense for Novell to own a distribution when, as part of its commitment to choice, it promises to support other distributions as well. Said Nugent, "That is true. We are committed to supporting any enterprise distribution of Linux. In addition to SuSE, our stuff runs on Red Hat. The Turbo guys have announced they'll be coming out with an enterprise Linux and when it's out, we'll support that. If tomorrow, the folks at Debian said they're coming out with an enterprise Linux, we'd support that too. So, in light of that, internally at Novell, we debated this ad nauseum and we still decided that we needed a distribution to be successful. We thought about coming out with a third enterprise distribution of our own (in addition to SuSE's and Red Hat's). But in addition to SuSE's enterprise mindset, we saw a company that was successful in Europe and that had great relationships in Latin America, South American and Asia."

Nugent made it clear that the SuSE deal shouldn't be recognised as a Linux play, or even an open-source play. "The decision was based on the fact that they understand the market," said Nugent. "Not the Linux market or the open-source market. The enterprise market."

Fair enough. SuSE may indeed be an excellent fit for this new generation of Novell. But with $50m of IBM's money in the mix, the real rationale is hard to deny.