Novell Execs: Microsoft Partnership Is Working Out Just Fine

Novell executives are ending 2007 by praising their own decision last year to form an alliance with Microsoft - - a deal aimed at providing interoperatiblity between Windows and Linux.

Both John Dragoon, Novell's chief marketing officer, and Jeff Jaffe, Novell's CTO, offer up blog posts today on the subject - - both praising the results of the arrangement with their one-time enemy from Redmond.

"Linux and Open Source technologies continue their advancement into today's data centers where according to Gartner, 67 percent of data centers run some combination of Linux and Windows," Dragoon wrote. "Serving this growing market reality was the driving catalyst behind our interoperability partnership with Microsoft."

Jaffe offered up a much lengthier description, along with a promise to shortly unveil Novell's 2008 technology roadmap. Among other things, he writes:

When we announced with Microsoft, we committed to create technical interoperability. In 2007, our two companies came through! Here's the substance. We published our joint interoperability roadmap " which received analyst acclaim. We've been executing against it since February. And four months ago, we took the partnership to the next level. After Microsoft saw Miguel de Icaza create the Moonlight technology in record time, Microsoft asked us to bring their multimedia Silverlight framework to the Linux desktop. Can you imagine that Microsoft is a Linux desktop ISV? We are turning the flywheel on interoperability!

Last month, we also announced that we are bringing Microsoft's accessibility framework to Linux. This points to our core values of being a Linux leader, an interoperability leader, a company that is bringing Microsoft into open source, and a socially concerned citizen improving access for the handicapped.

Those are several reasons Novell executives believe the deal with Microsoft has been beneficial. Although critics of Novell and Microsoft may point to 355.6 million more reasons Novell likes the deal. According to Novell's recent 10-K annual report, "During fiscal 2007, we received $355.6 million from Microsoft related to the Microsoft agreements discussed above, which is being recognized over future periods."