Dragoon believes that Novell is also beating Red Hat to the punch in bringing new products for the Linux platform to the market.

"Take for example Xen virtualisation, which is a hot topic today," he says.  "We'll be fully six months ahead of Red Hat in offering Xen 3.0 virtualisation in the marketplace. The technologies are the same but how quickly one can bring those technologies to the market is a differentiator."

Despite the positioning for Linux leadership, Dragoon insists that Red Hat is not the real enemy for Novell.

"I think the enemy is proprietary standards that don't allow people flexibility of choice in the enterprise" says Dragoon. "I actually don't think that Red Hat today is our enemy. We're more interested in the growth of the ecosystem itself. So, while we want to win more than our fair share against Red Hat and think that we have a stronger value proposition, we don't have specific marketing or sales campaigns that say Red Hat is the enemy. We think that would be counter-productive. We're more interested in taking business off Unix and, where possible, the folks at Redmond.

"We don't have Microsoft's resources and we're not going to have everything from day one but we do have this virtual community that addresses these things and I would suggest that the virtual community is larger than Microsoft's captive R&D community. A large part of the difference Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop10 and the previous version we had, was to sort out the interoperability and plug and play driver support."{moscomment}

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