Novell: The comeback kid

The NetWare network operating system probably suffered the most as a result of Microsoft moving into the network management space. Now with your acquisition of SuSE, even more questions are being asked about its long-term viability?

NetWare continues to be a great operating system and Novell continues to support it and support its continued development but if people want to move from NetWare to Linux then we will help them do that.

Your mantra at the moment is that "Novell is back". Was there a palpable change in the internal moral and general feel of the company after the SuSE deal was finally executed?

Yep. It's helped a lot to create an identity for Novell. Our company was built on proprietary software development so moving to open source required some major changes but it has definitely been worth it. Before people couldn't always work out who we were or what we did. Linux is really giving us an opportunity to go out there and talk to people again. Novell has become the only company that can offer a clear stack of Linux services.

Red Hat is still the number one Linux distribution. What's your strategy for knocking it off the top-spot?

They are number one in North America -- we haven't been that focused on the US up to now but we are now. The key differentiators here are that we have a robust identification tools and we have a retail product which they don't have.

As we are in SCO's home state, can I ask if you were surprised to hear the news that Microsoft was allegedly involved in Baystar's decision to fund SCO?

(Laughs) Was I surprised? Absolutely not. Our position on this whole situation is pretty well known in the market. We don't believe there is any Unix in Linux.