Microsoft-Novell alliance invades China
IT giants Microsoft and Novell to give particular interest to China market as its businesses become sophisticated.
Information Technology giants Microsoft and Novell will be giving “particular interest” to the huge China market and will expand their partnership in producing patent-protected and open source program that will be interoperable in that Asian country, the Agence France Presse (AFP) reported.
The AFP report said Microsoft and Novell intended to expand operations in China because increasingly sophisticated businesses in that country rely on combinations of software based on Microsoft’s Windows operating systems and non-proprietary Linux systems.
Novell vice president of global strategic alliances Susan Heystee said free Linux operating systems are popular in emerging markets such as China, India and Brazil.
The report said the two firms believe prominent firms in China are willing to pay to have the US firms keep hybrid systems updated and running and for assurances that there is permission to use patented software involved.
The companies are marketing “supported Linux” in which they take a fee to maintain software systems blending the open-source programs with Microsoft products such as Vista, Office, Excel and Outlook, the AFP report added.
“We recognize that our customers want to use Microsoft products in heterogeneous environments, and therefore we are pleased to offer this option to meet customer needs in one of the leading global markets,” said Ya-Qin Zang, chairman of Microsoft China. “We are very pleased with the initial response in the Chinese market to our joint offerings for IP peace of mind and technology interoperability in such areas as virtualization and high-performance computing.”
Microsoft and Novell, former rivals in the IT industry, unveiled their alliance in late 2006 and said their engineers were “building a bridge” between Microsoft’s proprietary software and Novell programs based on the Linux operating system.
It was the first time Microsoft and Novell targeted a specific country with their expansion programs, the AFP report noted.
“We’ve really seen in the market in China the need to have a supported Linux platform due to the level of mission critical jobs and the need for interoperability” said Heystee.
The report noted that statistics from industry-tracker IDC indicated that money spent on the type of paid Linux support being targeted in China increased 38.6 percent in the year after the Novell-Microsoft alliance.
Earlier, Novell reported that it has invoiced 141 million dollars in “SUSE Linux Enterprise Server subscriptions” during the collaboration with Microsoft.
“We are very pleased with the original approach by Microsoft and Novell to address our concerns about deploying and managing a complex high-performance computing infrastructure across two platforms,” said Nie Hua, vice president of Dawning Information Industry in China. “It is essential for our future competitiveness and success that we can simplify with such solutions.”
Microsoft general manager of strategic partnerships Susan Hauser said the company was not abandoning the proprietary software model on which its fortune is built. “We still think there is a tremendous amount of value in terms of Windows and proprietary models,” she told the AFP. “This is a pragmatic approach to there being a mix of platforms out there. This is a bridge between proprietary and open source.”
