HP enlists Linux partners to capture Aust enterprises

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 27 September 2005 10:00

IT Industry - Market

HP has formed partnerships with the two largest commercial Linux vendors in Australia, Red Hat and Novell, in a bid to capture enterprise-level customers.

The partnerships are aimed at helping customers deploy and integrate Linux into enterprise IT environments and provide a 'one-stop' for the ongoing support of Linux solutions - critical for Linux deployments on core business applications.

According to Mark Toner, Linux manager at HP services, a series of co-delivered options have been packaged to combine HP's enterprise mission critical computing experience focusing on HP's Linux Reference Architecture, with Red Hat and Novell's expertise in open source.

'It's clear that many organisations are experimenting with Linux across the entire IT department.  Customer feedback has indicated the integration of Linux into existing IT management tools and processes is challenging. Many IT managers see adding another operating system into their IT environment as a management nightmare. But it doesn't have to be as these same customers now have enterprise ready Linux support to ensure system integration, manageability and performance.'

'The services that we can now offer exclusively with Novell and Red Hat, give customers a full points-of-pain solution for the more regulated Red Hat Linux and SuSE versions.  We can offer end-to-end support for Linux environments, ensuring interoperability between hardware, operating system and middleware software. HP can provide operational and technical advice concerning Linux architecture decisions through to the more difficult task of porting and migration.' said Toner.

A core feature of the new partnerships will be a technical account manager from both HP and either Red Hat or Novell working together alongside an internal IT team.