Linux desktop gives Novell the edge on Red Hat: Hovsepian

Stan Beer
Monday, 10 April 2006 22:14

IT Industry - Development

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Novell president and chief operating officer, Ron Hovsepian believes the company’s new Linux desktop, based on Suse Linux 10.0, has made Novell an enterprise player while its competitor Red Hat has been marginalised for ignoring the space.

According to Hovsepian, who is in Australia on a market fact finding tour, focussing heavily on the desktop space has given Novell the jump on its corporate Linux rival Red Hat. Some pundits say that Red Hat has done the right thing by focussing on the profitable areas of the Linux market but Hovsepian disagrees.“Red Hat has really just focussed on being a web services and application services Linux distribution,” says Hovsepian.

“What we’ve really focussed on is being a full enterprise class distribution, with a full support array for the customer. We have a desktop, while they have an open source project called Fedora that lets you download the distribution and that’s it. By contrast, openSuse.org ties it right back into our test and development cycle, which is very different from Fedora. The desktop is just one more example of us building a full enterprise story for the customer.

“To be very specific, the desktop is critical to what the customer wants to get done. We believe that the customer wants an enterprise strategy that helps them run Linux on everything from z series mainframes to point of service to desktops. In order to claim we’re going to give the customer an enterprise strategy, we believe desktops have to be a part of it, thin client, as well as the medium and full client implementations. The really exciting part is we can do things very differently because everything we have is in an open source mode and the desktop is a critical part of the go forward strategy for our customers.”

According to Hovsepian, within two months we can expect to see a non-beta full release of the new Novell Suse Linux with the kind of functionality, plug and play and support that we have come to expect from Microsoft Windows.