Admittedly, the Microsoft deal still haunts Novell is some areas. Overall — financially — The VAR Guy thinks the deal helped Novell gain more face time with CIOs and more revenue. But on the downside, there’s no doubt many die-hard FOSS folks will never forgive Novell for signing the Microsoft deal.

Does that mean the OpenSUSE community has suffered? Frankly, The VAR Guy concedes he needs to take a much closer look at that question.

Though having a unified product line will help, it is surely not their major problem. When OpenSuse have to go to great length in their FAQ to distance themselves from Novell (a hard task considering they are not distant) in the hope of garnering community support, it would seem that the enterprise version, built on OpenSuse, is likely to wither from the roots up and that is probably a greater risk to Novell’s business in the long term.

You say: ‘If Novell can get its chips in line, then hopefully this will help push the open source platform futher into the heart of the IT market.’

I would consider this a miracle, as I have NEVER seen a manufacturer get their chips in line and then automagically their product is pushed into the heart of the IT market.

Granted as a salesperson I am biased here. But here again, I rarely, if ever, see a product ‘sell itself’. Usually a compensated salesperson makes this happen. The compensation is the salesperson’s motivation. Without compensation, there is no motivation and with no motivation there is no sale.

Please clarify how anything gets into the heart of the IT market without salespeople spreading the news? And if so, can Novell find good IT salespeople to sell their product without compensating them? My real world experience says: NO, NO, NO WAY. This stuff is dead out of the gate without highly qualified and motivated salespeople making IT departments aware of the benefitting technology. Microsoft pays more to its resellers to spread the news on its Office products, for example, and maybe this is the reason people spend 300 times more for MS Office than OpenOffice. And maybe that is why Microsoft has eaten into Novell’s marketshare since they stopped compensating their smaller partners for the valuable work they provided Novell ten years ago.

I called Novell once and said: ‘Hey, how come my cost at Ingram is above the CDW street price?’. The Novell sales person said: ‘They sell more, that is why they have a higher margin.’

I was able to translate this into: ‘Go away, you loser, and sell something else because we don’t need you, we have CDW.’

And that is what I did seven years ago.

The VAR Guy: Will Levy oversee all of the separate product efforts (SUSE, identity, security, etc.)?

Novell PR: Levy will work with our CTO, Jeff Jaffe, to drive our product development efforts across all the business units. This will help drive alignment across the solution centers we discussed when we met — data center, end user computing, and identity and security management.

The VAR Guy: Will Rex also oversee all those efforts on the technology side?

Novell PR: Rex will assume responsibility for OPS (Open Platform Solutions) which includes SUSE Linux Enterprise. This is his heritage — he came to Novell when we acquired SUSE. He’s a recognized technology guru in the Linux space.

The VAR Guy: Is it safe to expect stronger cross-brand messaging, promotions and partner programs from Novell? For instance, can SUSE partners expect to hear more about identity and security management? And vice-versa?

Novell PR: Yes. A goal is to drive value for partners and resellers across the business lines, and to focus on opportunities in the data center, end user computing, and identity/security management markets. For example, our strong brand and presence in the Linux market gives our partners excellent cross-sell and up-sell opportunities for systems management, virtualization, workload management, identity management, and so on.

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