Microsoft and Novell: Building Bridges

Microsoft and Novell: Building Bridges
from Microsoft

White Paper

Description:
On November 2, 2006, Microsoft and Novell announced a series of interoperability agreements to jointly build, market and seamlessly support new solutions designed to make Microsoft and Novell products work better together. The goal is to bridge the worlds of proprietary and open source technology based on a foundation of mutual respect for intellectual property. This white paper provides an inside look at the technical collaboration between the two companies and the customer solutions that they drive.

Microsoft White Paper Sample

Too often IT professionals must develop work arounds to connect disparate systems within their heterogeneous environments. With multiple operating systems, separate management tools, different skill set requirements and the limitations of data sharing as defined by workloads, the results can lead to underutilized server resources, poor infrastructure management, inefficient workflows and higher maintenance costs.

To address these customer challenges, Microsoft and Novell agreed to collaborate on a number of technical projects to improve operational efficiency in the data center. The companies first sought common ground on intellectual property. Then they developed a multi-year partnership for work pertaining to engineering and standards in the areas of virtualization, systems management, federated identity and document format interoperability. Microsoft and Novell established an interoperability lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for testing and developing these solutions, and a joint sales and marketing team to promote and sell the solutions. Since the partnership was announced in 2006, the two companies have engaged in three new areas of engineering: Moonlight, a Silverlight plug-in for Linux; User Interface (UI) Accessibility; and enterprise Linux management packs.

View This Now

View all resources by Microsoft