Chris Stone, Novell's vice chairman, has spoken about
the strategy behind his company's plan to acquire SuSE, and why
Novell chose SuSE instead of Red Hat.
How did the idea to acquire SuSE germinate?
In April at BrainShare is when we made the first announcement
that NetWare services were going to go basically on top of Linux.
We wanted to learn how the open-source community actually works. We
didn't want to be the big, bad enterprise company that dove into
it.
We had been working with SUSE for quite some time. But we
decided strategically that we really needed to provide the entire
stack. So it was about two months ago that we really decided to go
for it. They weren't out grocery shopping. We really decided this
is what we wanted to do, and we went after it.
Did you consider Red Hat as well?
Sure, we looked at everything. The two largest were Red Hat and
SuSE, and then we looked at the others - there are a good 35 Linux
OSs out there. Obviously, Red Hat was a bit pricy, so we decided we
had the best fit - economically, peoplewise, culturally - with
SuSE. They think like we do; they work like we do. They're very
technically competent. So it was a really natural fit.
When you say Red Hat was a bit pricy, does that mean
there were negotiations that got to the point of naming a
price?
No, we decided that SuSE was who we wanted to acquire. We made a
decision early on that SuSE was where we wanted to go. There was
always an effort on the part of Novell to have a relationship in
some form with Red Hat. We tried to form a support agreement with
Red Hat, and that didn't work. It worked beautifully with
SuSE.
I'd really like to clarify to what extent you had
acquisition discussions with Red Hat as well.
I'm not going to go there.
What does this mean for running NetWare on Red Hat
Enterprise Linux?
We still do that. We still certify the NetWare services on Red
Hat 3.0 as well as on SuSE. Obviously, now that we own the (SUSE
Linux) distribution, we have to potentially rethink that, but as of
right now, our customers have been asking for both. There's no
technical reason that we shouldn't provide at least an option if
you want to run it on Red Hat. But we're obviously going to lead
with SUSE.
So your advice to users running NetWare on Red Hat is to
move to SuSE?
Sure. You can have one-stop shopping from Novell. You can buy
the entire stack, support -- you name it, you got it.
Does this acquisition in any way change your plan to
make NetWare a set of services running on top of both the NetWare
and Linux operating system kernels?
Does it shift the balance more toward Linux? It fills the
missing piece. We've been talking about this for a long period of
time. People usually come back and say, "Wait a second here. You
don't have a Linux OS." Well, now we do.
There will always be NetWare - we'll continue building services
on NetWare. There will be a NetWare 7.0. There will be identical
services on both platforms - no change.
Don't you see this as a risky move at all, in light of
the legal actions SCO has taken with respect to Linux?
No, not at all. We think the SCO move is pretty much an
unsubstantiated claim. They've never been able to prove anything
they've been talking about. Our customers have not balked at this
issue. I don't believe SuSE has any particular issues with SCO. As
far as we're concerned, it hasn't been an issue.
Will SuSE continue to operate as a separate
entity?
SuSE will be a wholly owned subsidiary of Novell. [SuSE CEO]
Richard Seibt will be the CEO and general manager and work for
[Novell CEO] Jack [Messman]. Engineering and product development
will be focused with me. SuSE will be a business unit of Novell.
The sales forces will be integrated with both our Europe, Middle
East and Africa sales force and our North America sales force. We
have an integration plan in place; that will take some time.
So Seibt has confirmed that he's staying?
He certainly has. He's a happy camper.
Don Tennant writes for Computerworld
Analysts applaud Novell-SuSE deal >>
Red Hat drops free Linux OS in favour of Enterprise
>>
Novell prepares to take on Red Hat >>