Mandriva aims for the enterprise

... ways we're competing. We've got a product called Pulse, which is a distribution management product, for maintaining a large number of servers or workstations.

People who deploy Linux technology across an enterprise tend to be very sensitive to the total cost of operation, and the need to be able to administer a server is sometimes more critical to the choice people will make than the actual technology. That's why we've invested heavily in Pulse. It allows you to administer, at a very low cost with only a few people, a very large number of servers or workstations.

Another differentiation is that we present ourselves more as a solution provider than a box pusher.

Finally, we have a fairly flexible licence cost. We believe a per-box licence doesn't make sense in a large environment. Having to register a new licence or subscription each time you connect a new server doesn't make sense, and isn't what open source is all about.

How much of your current business does the enterprise account for?
Roughly 55 percent of our business is in the enterprise, in terms of revenue, and our enterprise business is growing a bit faster than the consumer side. We have a few smaller business customers, but mainly we are after large organisations. In Brazil there's HSBC and Casas Bahia (the largest retail chain store in Brazil). We have US sites at companies such as Verizon. In France, there's France Télécom, the Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of Agriculture, and so on.

How important are markets outside Europe and the US?
We're strongly established in one letter, the letter B. In Brazil we sell an average of 30,000 per month at retail. In that market, a very sizeable part of the consumer market is going to be Linux. We have a very strong partner there, who happens to be the leading integrator, Positivo. In other areas we are hoping to duplicate this opportunity.

We see opportunities in most of the countries in North Africa, Azerbaijan, Venezuela, Georgia, and so on. There is a good match between Linux and the emerging market. There's a strong political will behind it in some of these countries. It's a long process, but once we get established we believe it will be a strong market for us.

How does your installed base of consumers fit into your strategy?
Doing both a corporate and a consumer version makes sense. There are two synergies. One is technical, in that all the work we do on the kernel, the hardware qualifications, the core components are the same for both versions.

The second thing is that very often people who have bought or downloaded Mandriva for their own usage are those who recommend or prescribe it for the company where they work.

What's coming up with Mandriva 2007?
There is some 3D stuff that's amazingly cool. One of the differences there is that we will support both AIGL and XGL. One is more oriented towards supporting open source drivers, and the other towards proprietary drivers. We have introduced a mechanism to diagnose the hardware and tell which one to download and use, which gives us a wide coverage. We are the only ones to my knowledge that are supporting both.

The commercial version will include LinDVD, giving you the full ability to legally watch DVDs. There will be some new games, virtualisation built in, and we've done a lot of work on firewalling.

How will it compare with Windows Vista?
It's here! That's the main advantage over Vista.

Besides the standard distribution with Mandriva 2007, you will have a version called Mandriva One, which is a live install disc. How do you see such versions fitting in with your overall strategy?
We need to keep investing in the technology. As we're cranking out 2007, we're already working on the next one. We're going to wait a whole year this time, and come out with something new in the spring.

What can we expect to see from Mandriva in the near future?
The next thing is the corporate desktop, sometime before the end of this year, in November or early December. Then, that's it — we'll have a fully new lineup, with Corporate Server, Corporate Desktop and Mandriva 2007. The whole set is brand new, and now we're going to focus on selling it.