[KLUG Members] Novell/Linux Preso Today

[Tony Gettig]

Hi All,

I attended the Novell/Linux presentation at M-TEC in Kalamazoo today. The
presenter was Scott Lewis, Director of Solutions Management for Novell North
America. Not just another sales dude...this guy was from near the top of
management at Novell. (When you have "of North America" in your title...) He had
quite a bit to say, and most of it was without a "salesman" approach. Some of
the highlights for me:

- Novell is seeing more opportunity for the adoption of OSS at the desktop with
applications like OpenOffice than they are Linux desktops. It's a good step
forward IMO. Internally, they are planning to switch their corporate office
suite to OpenOffice for fiscal reasons, opting not to renew their license
agreement with Microsoft (at least for Office).

- His entire presentation was done with OpenOffice on SuSE Linux with XD2. This
is in contrast to the gentleman from Novell that presented to KLUG. :P

- He said they are going to basically let the business markets decide the KDE v.
Gnome holy war. They are not taking sides. No hint of keeping KDE updated
through Red Carpet, but then again, no one asked. (I didn't think of it until
just now.)

- I *think* he said that 2004 will see the release of Novell Linux Services 2.0,
which will have, according his slide, 98% of the functionality of NetWare 6.5. I
could have read that wrong, but that's what I think I saw and heard.

- Out of the box, NetWare 7.0 will run on either a NetWare kernel or a Linux
kernel. He said it is still an internal debate whether Novell will ship a
stripped down kernel to run the NetWare Services on or not. That is kind of
interesting...don't bother with a distribution and all the extras that get
installed with it, just boot a kernel and the NetWare services on top of it.
Sounds cool to me.

- Lots of the same customer stories of ROI and TCO for switching to Linux.
Anyone who says Linux is not ready for the enterprise is choosing to be blind.
Refer them to Cisco, Ford, Met, Merrill Lynch, SAP, etc.....

- Novell will be open sourcing more projects.

- IBM's $50 million investment in Novell equates to the private stake they had
in SuSE before the acquisition. (Interesting trivia.)

Overall, I thought it was a good presentation. It was great to see so many
people there and the ever growing interest in Linux. 


-- 
Tony Gettig
Voiceovers, PGP key, and more at
http://gettig.net