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The Nov. 2 announcement of a mutual-assistance contract between Microsoft and Novell has been greeted by others with reactions ranging from modest hopes for interoperability improvements to great anger.
Tom Kemp, CEO of Centrify, a company that specializes in products that link Unix, Linux, Mac, J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) and Web platforms with Microsoft Active Directory, watched the Novell/Microsoft announcement with special interest.
“It seems every year they [Microsoft] have one of these Détente meetings.” By addressing the “patent issue across the two vendors, [it] now looms over Red Hat vis a vis any Microsoft patents,” Kemp said.
Kemp continued, saying it also “throws a serious light on interoperability, and [draws] a lot of attention to that topic which will benefit a vendor such as us who does interoperability for many platforms beyond SUSE.
“Microsoft will now have dedicated solutions reps focusing on [interoperability]; we will hopefully hook up with these people. Because once Microsoft starts talking about interoperability with customers, customers will have more than just SUSE, and it will lead naturally to the question of what vendor can address interoperability beyond AD, and that leads to us.”
So thats all for the good, as far as Centrify is concerned. “But frankly most of this interoperability announcement is not about AD [Active Directory] interoperability (which is not actually addressed in this announcement besides a sentence about making eDirectory and AD talk better to each other, which is different from what we do) but about other technical areas (virtualization, doc formatting, etc.).
“I think the bigger news is in the patent area and the mutual tweaking of Red Hat.”