Microsoft Faces Skeptics at Open Source Conference
- By Jeffrey Schwartz
- 04/08/08
Nearly a year and a half after striking
their improbable alliance to provide better interoperability between open
source and Windows-based platforms, Microsoft and Novell told developers last
week that the pact has yielded technical benefits but there's still work to
be completed, particularly on the interoperability between the two
companies' enterprise directory platforms.
Representatives of both companies provided a status report of their collaboration
at the annual Linux/Open Source
on Wall Street conference held in New York this week. Microsoft says it
has sold more than 100,000 SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) licenses to about
60 large enterprise customers, among them Credit Suisse, HSBC, Synovus Financial
Corp., and Wal-Mart.
"We've learned a lot," said Peter Rodriques, Microsoft's director
of customer advocacy and licensing, during his opening remarks. "For the
most part, it's been incredibly successful in terms of feedback in the business
community and technical communities."
In an interview, Rodriques added that Microsoft's pact with Novell helped set
the stage for Redmond's
interoperability pledge, made in February.
Virtual Progress
Microsoft and Novell have identified four key goals in their technical collaboration
agreement (TCA). To date, the companies have made the most progress in ensuring
both platforms work in virtualized environments so that Windows Server is recognized
on an SLES host and vice versa, said Jose Thomas, a senior technical evangelist
at Microsoft. The other three areas of focus include common systems management,
interoperability of Microsoft's Active Directory with Novell's eDirectory, and
document format compatibility.
Thomas demonstrated SLES running as a virtual machine on a Windows Server 2008
host and underscored that the same interoperability works in the reverse scenario.
The goal, according to Thomas, was for Windows to run as a "fully enlightened"
guest on SLES and vice versa. The demo used a beta version of Microsoft's much-anticipated
Hyper-V hypervisor.