30 Minute Interview

Making Linux interoperable

Maarten Koster, President, Novell Asia Pacific, talks to Kushal Shah about the different strategies adopted by Novell and the company’s partnership with Microsoft.

Maarten Koster

What is the basic strategy adopted by Novell?

As part of our overall strategy, we are an IT infrastructure company which basically focuses on cost, complexity and risks associated with the product. We believe in making things cheaper and make them security focused by reducing risks. Current IT environments are complex and heterogeneous and there is a need to reduce that complexity and we work towards that. We concentrate on securing and managing heterogeneous environments. It doesn’t matter whether the customer has Linux installed or Windows, Novell as a company mirrors the customer organisation and provide the service. Resources are limited, so Novell is concentrating on encouraging our business partners to join with us and get involved in the process of crafting solutions.

Where is Novell positioned in the market?

The growth of Linux in the Asia Pacific is outpacing the market average. Apart from our direct sales forces of our employees we have the business partner’s sales force; IBM, HP, Dell, and now Microsoft act as vendors selling or referring our product along with their services. This is a high level strategy that seems to be working fine and it’s reflected in our share price and in analyst reports. We don’t play in the free product market. We have deliberately not positioned ourselves in that way. We are playing in the business segment, be it medium or large. As part of our go-to-market strategy, we have tied up with one of the major universities in China wherein we load Linux on all laptops. Apart from this, we have deal with disk manufacturers in China where we preload Linux on disks before they are sold. As part of the large vendor partnership, we have relationships with companies such as Dell, HP, and IBM.

Can you tell us about the trends that are shaping the Linux market?

Linux started off in the middle segment of the market whereas we started at the top end and have already captured about 90 percent of the IBM mainframe segment which runs SUSE Linux. Our competitors were focused on the middle end. As the distribution network is expanding we are moving to the middle layer and the data centre space and our competitors are going towards the top end. The other trend is that of the levels of interest in Linux amongst top vendors. We have a strong relationship with IBM and are building relationships with HP and Microsoft. They are serious because their customers desire it. There is one more factor coming into play these days and it is that companies are installing Linux more and more even for their mission-critical applications.

For a medium business, is adopting Linux a matter of price or quality?

It’s both; people do injustice when they say that Linux is good enough for a medium business. Medium businesses are as important as large ones as far as applications are concerned. There is definitely a price dimension to it. Linux can do the same thing at a competitive price. It is wrong to assume that the top end does not care about the budget but they have more flexibility.

In India, Linux is more widely associated with Red Hat rather than SUSE. What is your take on that?

Red Hat has the first mover advantage in India but they concentrated on the mid-market whereas we concentrated more on the top end of the market. The difference is that the top companies do not ask me about Red Hat but they ask me what I can do for their mission-critical applications. In that sense we have credibility. They ask me about interoperability. At the end of the day the customer cares about what we are going to give which others do not. We have strong answers for all the questions of customers whereas Red Hat can only provide Linux.

Is server consolidation and virtualisation picking up?

Among large customers we largely find Windows and Linux environments. They are struggling with big workloads. They have business applications running on Windows and are not able to shift their workloads. CIOs want help in that and they say that they are able to virtualise both environments but they cannot shift applications between them. We along with Microsoft are working to make this virtualisation seamless. All the CIOs I have spoken to have virtualisation on their radar screens. These two things, security and virtualisation, are on the radars of all the companies.

Can you explain your relationship with Microsoft and its impact on the Asia Pacific market?

This partnership will deal with three major areas. The first is interoperability between two environments; synchronisation with both directories such as e-directory and active directory; and document formatting. We are making sure that OpenOffice documents are completely compatible with Microsoft Office documents. These are three areas of interoperability that we are working on in this partnership. The second area is of intellectual property. We have agreed not to sue mutual customers but old claims on each other are still valid. Interoperability is accepted by the market space but the IP issue has seen some difference of opinion. The third and the last area of this partnership is that of business cooperation.

Microsoft is signing maintenance and subscriptions for SUSE Linux for its own customers which is a disruptive event in the industry but due to this, large customers who have Linux in the periphery are moving to full Linux implementations and the shift in confidence is taking place.

How do you respond to the opposition from the open source community to this deal?

We take the open source community very seriously and continue to engage with them at all sorts of levels. We are hell bent on maintaining the relationship. What we also see is what this deal means for customers. We have got overwhelming support from customers. There have been concerns but even within the community support has been good, but all communities have people on both sides and that will always be there.

Regarding security in Linux, will it continue to be as secure as its popularity goes up?

Clearly as Linux goes deeper into the mainstream there will be more attacks. That is why we take our security products seriously. The way that Linux is engineered is very good. It is secured. The core is solid and that is why you do not have problems. The community acts as a watchdog and they keep an eye on the health of the product. If companies feel that if they have Linux then they need not worry, that’s a bad approach. Most security breaches come from within a company. They have to secure the organisation in any case.