The relationship extends through Jan. 1, 2016, with Microsoft committed to invest $100 million in new SUSE Linux Enterprise certificates.
Microsoft and SUSE have begun
preparing the next phase of their cross-platform interoperability story. Microsoft and SUSE, now
an independent business unit of Attachmate, announced a four-year extension of
the agreement struck nearly five years ago between Microsoft and
Novell for broad collaboration on Windows and Linux interoperability and
support.
This relationship will extend through Jan. 1, 2016, with Microsoft
committed to investing $100 million in new SUSE Linux Enterprise certificates
for customers receiving Linux support from SUSE.
"Surveying the progress we
have made over the past five years, I expect our technical collaboration
specific to cross-platform virtualization and systems management will serve as
a critical building block in the very heterogeneous world that exists within
today's data center as we strive to help our customers embrace the cloud,"
Sandy Gupta, general manager of Microsoft's open solutions group, wrote in a
blog post. "[The] announcement is a response to sentiments expressed by
customers far and wide that Microsoft and SUSE begin crafting the next chapter
of the cross-platform interoperability story."
The joint Microsoft-SUSE
collaboration has served more than 725 customers worldwide across a range of
industries, such as manufacturing, oil and gas, health care and financial
services. In addition, through this alliance, SUSE enables customers to
consolidate their Linux support by offering subscription support for SUSE Linux
Enterprise Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and community Linux distributions
such as CentOS.
"As one of the largest
banking corporations in Spain, we offer our clients a broad portfolio of
financial products and services," Fernando Martinez, infrastructure manager at
BBVA Bank, said in a statement. "In an operational environment this dynamic and
stratified, the personnel, teamwork, ethical principles and technology define
the backbone of our business. We rely on the SUSE Expanded Support Program to
migrate part of our IT operations to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, as it
supports our objectives for greater interoperability for our Windows and Linux
systems."
Microsoft and SUSE officials
said they would continue their technical collaboration on solutions to help
customers work more efficiently in the areas of cloud, virtualization and
manageability. One such example is through the combination of a cross-platform
solution with Microsoft Hyper-V Cloud and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, giving
IT managers a solution to migrate to a private-cloud architecture. The companies
also plan to extend Microsoft System Center through integration with SUSE
Manager and select technologies to enhance Linux deployment, patching and
updating.
"The Microsoft-SUSE expanded
support program has helped a number of our customers standardize on SUSE as an
optimized guest on Hyper-V, as well as provide a highly cost-effective support
program for non-SUSE distributions, including Red Hat," said James Largotta,
global vice president of sales for BridgeWays, an independent software vendor
that develops management packs to extend the cross-platform capabilities of
Microsoft System Center. "Because of this, we find the interoperability
partnership between Microsoft and SUSE to be highly complementary to the work
we do, especially with the emergence of the private cloud."
A joint Microsoft-SUSE press
statement said as this collaboration moves forward, the two companies will
continue to offer the "highest levels" of interoperability and assurance that
both companies stand behind their solutions. Microsoft's Gupta said he has met
directly with a number of IT executives around the world over the past 12
months who have spoken highly of the solutions they have delivered jointly with
SUSE to their organizations that address priority problems - whether it be
different workloads such as HPC, solutions for virtualization, and/or
management within a heterogeneous data center environment.
Nathan Eddy is Associate Editor, Midmarket, at eWEEK.com. Before joining eWEEK.com, Nate was a writer with ChannelWeb and he served as an editor at FierceMarkets. He is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.
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