You know the stereotype: Microsoft is the sworn enemy of openness, unwilling to open its code or hardware to others. It's a monopolist bent on world domination, willing to use its lawyers and market strength to ensure that Windows and Office don't face any serious competition.
Ex-Microsoft CEO and current Chairman Bill Gates is testifying Monday in U.S. Federal Court in a seven-year-old, US$1 billion antitrust lawsuit by Novell.
Since April, Nils Brauckmann has had the future of enterprise <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/topics/linux.html">Linux</a> in his hands. That's when the <a href="http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/attachmates-eyes-cloud-customers-suse-259">Attachmate Group completed its acquisition of Novell and split the company into two operating units</a>: Novell and SUSE. As president and GM of SUSE, long-time Attachmate executive Brauckmann is responsible for bringing Suse Linux Enterprise <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/topics/server.html">Server</a> and other <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/subnets/opensource/">open source</a> products to market. In this latest installment of the IDG Enterprise CEO Interview Series, Brauckmann shared with IDGE Chief Content Officer John Gallant his views on the future of open source, his strategy for competing against Red Hat, and SUSE's plans for helping customers build private and hybrid clouds. He also outlined his philosophy for working successfully with the open source community, talked about the role desktop Linux will and won't play in the enterprise, and explained where <a href="http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source-software/microsoft-extends-suse-linux-partnership-168003">SUSE's partnership</a> will <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/subnets/microsoft/">Microsoft</a> is headed.
Novell, which was <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/042711-novell-attachment-merger.html">acquired by The Attachmate Group</a> in April, wants to regain its status as an IT icon and will try to do so by focusing its efforts on its core assets and rebuilding relationships with its huge installed base. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix recently caught up with Novell President Bob Flynn and VP of Product Management and Marketing Eric Varness for a briefing on their rebuilding plans.
Google's interest in Motorola may really be just for the patents after all.
When Debbie Cancilla took charge of the IT operation at Grady Health System, which operates one of the largest public hospitals in the U.S., she inherited an email system that had become a nightmare for doctors, nurses and administrators.
In an escalation of Android patent battles, Microsoft said it urged Google's legal team to join Microsoft in buying up hundreds of Nortel patents, but Google refused.
Novell has decided to shut down its Web-hosted Vibe Cloud enterprise social collaboration suite, which bombed with customers although the market is hot for competing products.
NSW Health has started preparing the consolidation of all its disparate e-mail systems into one Microsoft Exchange environment for some 200,000 end-users across the state government department with the big loser being Novell's GroupWise.
If cell phone maker Nokia rolls out a tablet device one day, it will be late to a game where its competitors have a big head start.
Attachmate intends to revitalize the sales and technical development of the end-user computing products that it acquired when it purchased Novell, such as those for virtualization and enterprise collaboration.
The Attachmate Group this week finalized its $2.2 billion buyout of network industry pioneer Novell, which begins the next phase of its evolution. Attachmate will operate Novell as two separate business units, one focused on the Novell brand and the other on the SUSE Linux brand. In addition, the privately held Attachmate Group has business units focused on the Attachmate and NetIQ brands. IDG Enterprise's Chief Content Officer John Gallant spoke with Attachmate Chairman and CEO Jeff Hawn shortly after the Novell deal was sealed to get his thoughts on what the acquisition means for Attachmate and its new and old customers.
The Attachmate Group announced Wednesday that it has completed its $2.2 billion acquisition of Novell, a networking pioneer in the 1980s that’s now being described as “a leader in intelligent workload management” by its new owner.
Having closed its $2.2 billion acquisition of Novell, Attachmate now is eyeing cloud service providers as potential customers for the company's newly acquired Suse Linux platform. The company also plans to continue promoting Suse for deployment on mainframes and as a Unix replacement.
Microsoft will not be able to keep patents it proposed to buy from Novell under an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice announced Wednesday.