Novell didnt win many friends in the open-source community with its Microsoft partnership. However, that deal, along with Novells growing partnerships with enterprise software players such as SAP and now Capgemini are bound to win it friends in big business.
On June 5, Capgemini, a major global consulting and outsourcing services company, and Novell announced a broad partnership that aims to deliver new software and services to enterprise customers using a combination of open-source and proprietary software. Under the terms of the agreement, Capgemini will enhance its open-source consulting practice with Novell capabilities. Specifically, Capgemini will start deploying IT technology using both SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Desktop along with mixed-source applications and management tools.
“We are pleased to enter into this partnership with Novell,” said Paul Hermelin, Capgemini CEO, in a statement. “Every day we hear from more customers that open source is becoming a critical part of their IT strategy as they seek choice and value. Capgemini prides itself on its ability to help customers identify and deploy mission-critical technologies that will help them improve their IT infrastructure effectiveness, and this partnership with Novell is critical to fulfilling these needs. Novell, through its SUSE Linux Enterprise platform and ZENworks management suite, is a key vendor offering a complete solution.”
With this partnership, Capgeminis customers gain fully supported mixed-source technologies built on open-source and proprietary software that Capgemini will help build, deploy and maintain. The Capgemini Open Source practice will help customers define enterprise open-source governance and select the right open-source software to deploy on top of a flexible, fully supported Novell platform that delivers optimized performance.
In addition, Novell open-source software will be supported via Capgeminis open-source Support Service Center (OSSPartner) offering. Novell plans to provide Level 3 support to Capgemini and its customers.
