November, 2009

Novell and Microsoft pact reaches third year mark

This post was contributed to by Pam Derringer, News Writer

On the third anniversary of the 2006 Microsoft-Novell pact, Novell is touting 475 customers who have bought SUSE Linux Enterprise certificates from Microsoft under the settlement. Under the controversial agreement, Novell agreed to give Microsoft either a percentage of all its Linux revenue through 2011 or a minimum of $40 million. Microsoft, in turn, bought $240 million in SUSE certificates that it could then resell to customers with mixed environments who wanted to buy new Windows servers and purchase Linux machines. In addition, Microsoft gave Novell another $108 million as a “balancing payment” in connection with the patent part of the deal.

This joint marketing initiative worked so well in the first two years that Microsoft committed to buying up to an additional $100 million in SUSE certificates in the summer of 2008. To date, Microsoft has only actually purchased an additional $25 million. In fact, SUSE certificate sales boomed so much in 2007 that they were cited as a major factor in SUSE’s three-point market share gain that year vs. Red Hat.

A look at the numbers after three years
While interoperability was the stated goal of the partnership, financial factors were the key motivator for both companies.

“While technical interoperability was the announced basis for the Microsoft relationship, Novell did the deal because it needed to jump start its Linux subscription sales,” said Bill Claybrook, founder of New River Marketing Research, a firm specializing in Linux. “In November 2006, Novell was on the tail end of four or five consecutive quarters of flat SUSE Linux Enterprise Server subscription sales. At the same time, Red Hat was reporting year over year increases in revenue and subscription sales of 30% - 40%, and Red Hat was already way ahead of Novell in subscriptions sold and in revenue from subscriptions.”
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Zend Server now available through Oracle Unbreakable Linux Network

While most of Zend Technologies’ products have been available to Linux users for some time, they haven’t been as easily available to Oracle Unbreakable Linux users until now. Today, Zend announced a partnership with Oracle for an integrated and optimized Linux and PHP solution. This includes extending access to Zend Server for Oracle customers via the Oracle Unbreakable Linux Network (ULN), helping to speed installation for their PHP-based Web applications. Zend Server now also includes out-of-the-box enterprise-grade connectivity to Oracle’s database.

On October 20, 2009, Zend released a beta version of Zend Server 5.0, which includes a new feature, dubbed “Code Tracer.”

For the first time, PHP developers and administrators can quickly pinpoint the root cause of a problem in production by viewing a “digital documentary” of the execution of their application – similar to a black box flight recorder in an airplane – and avoid the time-consuming task of recreating the problem.