Hard work pays off!
There’s something to be said for seeing something through, even if the decision is unpopular, because – in the end – the payoff may have been worth it. When Microsoft and Novell announced their partnership in 2006, the news rattled the industry. I still recall debates about whether or not this was a publicity stunt or whether it was even appropriate for an ‘open source’ company to work with Microsoft at all. In the end, the industry spent more time debating the merits of development models rather than focusing on customer need we were trying to address.
Why collaborate?
At the end of the day, after all, customers need technology that works well – they demand value. Competition for those customers makes us work harder to innovate. Innovation, however, often takes us down paths that don’t always align. So when a customer gives us the privilege of becoming part of his IT infrastructure, we bear some responsibility to make sure that our products work well within that customer’s environment. Microsoft and Novell realized this and decided to work together – perhaps to even set an example, or raise the bar, for how other vendors should think about these same issues.
The results…
I would argue that the decision to collaborate is paying off. Not just for the partnership, but more importantly for the hundreds of companies who have leveraged our interoperability solutions and who are now reducing costs and complexity in their datacenters. As I think about it, this has truly become a win-win-win scenario. From my perspective, however, it was important to know a bit more about the total value of our joint efforts.
The news (finally)…
To that end, we’re announcing the release of two papers today that outline some of the great value being delivered to our joint customers. One paper, authored by Forrester and commissioned by the Microsoft-Novell Alliance, explores the financial benefit of deploying the interoperability solutions and describes a potential payback period of under a year for the investments. The second paper, authored by Oliver Wyman and commissioned by Novell, explores the value of more flexible support models in the Linux ecosystem, highlighting - in part - the positive impact of Novell’s Expanded Support Program for customers who want to transition from RHEL to SUSE but who need more flexibility in their migration timeline.
These studies highlight the choice, flexibility, and improved costs customers can expect to realize from greater interoperability between Windows and SUSE Linux Enterprise - which, from a partnership perspective, is what we hoped to accomplish in the first place. Hard work pays off.
If you want to read the studies click here and the press release can be found here.
If you want more information about how we might be able to help you reduce costs and complexity, please let us know. We have a number of solutions and several proof-of-concept offers that we can make available.