SUSE Linux Agreement with Microsoft Extended Four Years
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Microsoft has extended its agreement with SUSE for another four years. The software giant has committed to invest $100 million to acquire new certificates for enterprise customers receiving Linux support from the independent business unit of the Attachment Group, which acquired SUSE's former owner Novell for $2.2 billion under an agreement inked last November.
Under the original five-year deal with Novell, Microsoft and SUSE jointly served the needs of more than 725 enterprise-class customers around the world in the manufacturing, oil and gas, healthcare and financial-services industries. What's more, SUSE provided Microsoft's customers with consolidated Linux support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and community Linux distributions such as CentOS.
"Our mutual commitment to help organizations make the most of mixed Linux and Windows Server environments is what has made this collaboration successful," said SUSE Vice President Michael Miller on Monday. "We will continue to work with Microsoft to deliver solutions that enable our joint customers to manage critical workloads in mixed-source environments across a wide range of computing models, including private, hybrid and full cloud implementations."
A Big Step Forward
The fact that the industry today has interoperability is a big step forward compared to the old days, noted Ulrich Trottenberg, a director at the Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing (SCAI). And moving forward it's important that Microsoft and SUSE are proactively exploring ways to further improve platform interoperability, Trottenberg observed.
"For Fraunhofer SCAI, this is critical because we have so many different technologies that we must work with to meet the needs of our customers and to support our own research," Trottenberg said.
However, he also alluded to the Microsoft-SUSE deal as having resolved intellectual-property concerns. Microsoft's original SUSE deal with Novell guaranteed that joint Microsoft-SUSE customers would not be threatened by the software giant's patent...
2011-07-27 07:24:58
