Barbara Gengler | April 08, 2008
IN a move to boost the growing demand for SUSE Linux Enterprise, Novell says it has extended its partnership with SAP to offer enhanced options for customers who choose to run open source.
SAP, which this month led a group of 65 sponsors and exhibitors at Novell's BrainShare (a conference with 5500 participants from 58 countries), says it will work with Novell to enable its enterprise application to work with SUSE Linux Enterprise and Novell's virtualisation and identity management systems.
As part of the initiative, SAP and Novell plan to optimise SUSE Linux Enterprise for SAP's data centre infrastructure requirements and continue to promote SAP Business All-in-One systems based on SUSE Linux Enterprise.
The two companies will collaborate in the SAP Enterprise Services Community program to strengthen customers' governance, risk and compliance practices by supporting business access risk policies directly to user provisioning activities.
In addition, SAP is using SUSE Linux Enterprise Server internally as its Linux development platform to ensure that SAP applications are engineered from the ground up to run well on Linux.
SAP senior vice-president Pat Hume told participants at Novell's BrainShare that proprietary systems are a thing of the past.
"The market, and SAP, must embrace open systems, and Novell's open solutions will be made available to SAP's customers through a variety of engagements," she said.
"These include its Hosting services, SAP Developer Network community, Business By Design and Business All-in-One solutions."
SAP, which has roughly 41,000 customers and intends to grow that to 100,000 by 2010, says this is an important partnership.
"Novell is experiencing the momentum and benefits of focusing on meeting customer needs," Novell president and chief executive Ron Hovespian says, with growth across all the company's product lines, acquisitions such as SiteScape for strengthened collaboration and partnerships with SAP, Atos Origin and other global leaders.
"From our entrance into the Linux market, our focus has been on delivering Linux for mission-critical deployments in the data centre and this relationship with SAP is a key step forward in that."
Novell's Linux business has become one of its fastest growing and Hovespian says a sizeable portion of the company's efforts will remain centered on SUSE Linux.
Novell's Linux revenue is strong, growing 65 per cent between the first quarter of 2006 and the first quarter of 2007, Hovespian says.
SUSE Linux 11 will include Unix-to-Linux migration tools as well as more virtualisation, interoperability and desktop features.
Objectives include increased optimisation with Windows, easier Unix migrations and reducing power consumption and the broadening of Novell's ecosystem through strengthened interoperability with SAP.
Novell currently has some 400,000 installations of OpenSUSE.
The Novell/SAP partnership, which began about a year ago, includes SAP using SUSE Linux Enterprise (64-bit version) as one of the platforms for its SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence Accelerator (SAP NetWeaver BI Accelerator) software, an appliance jointly developed with Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Intel that improves the performance of business intelligence queries and reduces administration tasks.
The two will also integrate ZENworks Orchestrator, Novell's cross-platform virtualisation management system, with the Adaptive Computing Controller tool in SAP's NetWeaver.
As Linux continues to grow as a mainstream platform for supporting business applications, it becomes increasingly important for collaborative relationships between application software vendors such as SAP and infrastructure software vendors such as Novell, IDC analyst Al Gillen says.
"This development, support and go-to-market effort should make it possible for SAP and Novell to deliver a better integrated and more technically complete system," he says.
"The end result is a lower barrier to adoption for SAP applications and an expanded addressable market for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server."