Novell and SAP strengthen relationship to deliver business critical Linux

The pair say they are planning to offer enhanced options for users who want to run open source – meaning they’ll work together to enable SAP’s applications to work with SUSE Linux and Novell’s virtualisation and identity management technologies. They will also optimise SUSE Linux Enterprise for SAP’s data centre requirements, and promote SAP Business All-in-One ERP and supply chain solutions based on open source – eventually enabling companies of all sizes to run more of their ‘mission-critical’ operations this way, and thus cut costs. Says Novell president and CEO Ron Hovsepian: “We can now offer one of the best data centre platforms and application stacks on the market, bar none. Extending this co-operation will make this a real game-changing relationship in the marketplace.” Novell and SAP say they will integrate ZENworks Orchestrator, Novell’s cross-platform virtualisation management solution, with the Adaptive Computing Controller tool in SAP NetWeaver in order to increase virtualisation options for SAP users, cut costs and optimise deployment. SAP is also using the 64-bit version of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as one of the platforms for its NetWeaver Business Intelligence Accelerator appliance, developed with HP, IBM and Intel to give users fast response, high performance querying regardless of data volumes, number of users and complexity of analysis. “Organisations worldwide are increasingly turning to open source solutions with Linux as their core platform, so teaming with Novell and offering our customers SAP applications on SUSE Linux Enterprise meets a direct customer need,” says Léo Apotheker, deputy CEO and president of customer solutions and operations, SAP. “Our cooperation goes beyond Linux to leverage industry-leading technologies from each company to give customers high-value, low-complexity solutions to pressing challenges, such as regulatory requirements and optimising applications in virtualised environments,” he adds. Commenting, Al Gillen, research vice president, System Software at independent analyst IDC, says: “As Linux continues to grow as a mainstream platform for supporting business applications, it becomes increasingly important for collaborative relationships between application software vendors such as SAP and infrastructure software vendors such as Novell. “This development, support and go-to-market effort should make it possible for SAP and Novell to deliver a better-integrated and more technically complete solution than users could achieve by assembling the same components on their own today. The end result is a lower barrier to adoption for SAP applications, particularly for mid-market companies, and an expanded addressable market for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.”