What was the reasoning behind IBM's $50m investment in Novell? What benefit will this tighter relationship with IBM bring customers?
A lot of that is being worked through at the moment. IBM has a lot of confidence and support in what we are doing here. What we are now working through with IBM is how we can go to market. IBM, for example, provides management services into a lot of companies that have existing Novell infrastructure and it's those mutual customers who will benefit initially.
Given Novell's strong position in the Linux desktop space have you got any plans to follow IBM's lead and commit to rolling out desktop Linux internally?
I think that will come. I think it was a very positive move from what we have seen. Locally here I think people are very excited here by what you can do with the Ximian desktop and I have certainly got my staff here running several pilots here from sales people, technical people, pre-sales people who are all running and evaluating in how the Ximian desktop would work in the particular environment.
How many seats is that roughly?
It's around 10 to 15 percent of the UK team. It's been going on since we had access to the Ximian environment back in late summer last year.
Any feedback from how those trials are going?
Most people are encouraged by it. Certainly if you're a salesperson carrying a lap-top and your customer asks you exactly the same question you asked me then you can open up the laptop and show them.
When do you see a wholesale move over to Linux on the desktop?
The intention from Novell is fairly aggressive. If you look at what we have traditionally done with our own technology, which is we have always run our own business on our technology I don't see that changing as we go forward. It would be nice if we could get as many people off the Windows environment as possible so we didn't have to pay any recurring licensing costs to Microsoft.
Can we expect a similar announcement to the one made by IBM in the next six-months?
I'd say again that the monitor to watch is BrainShare. That's where a lot of these kind of announcements will be made plus the majority of our ISV people are based in Utah [the site of the conference] too.
Over the last six months you've gone from being off a lot of people's radars to being back in the game again following the Ximian and Suse acquisitions. How has that changed the culture inside Novell?
There is definitely a renewed confidence, we are running events that are being very well attended and oversubscribed. There is certainly a lot of interest, a lot of customer contact coming back to us. There are customers that haven't talked to us for a couple of years who want to engage with us again. We are seeing quite a sea change.
Some people might say that Novell has been in this position before but ended dropping the ball against Microsoft?
There are a couple of core values that Novell has that have allowed us to maintain our status as a billion dollar company for the last twenty years and I see those being transitioned into this new environment. I don't think there is a great deal to lose.
