SALT LAKE CITY—Novell Inc. on Wednesday announced an expansion of its SuSE Linuxs division agreements with IBM Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. here at its annual BrainShare conference.
Novell said IBM will continue shopping SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES). As part of the agreement, IBM can ship, or preload, SLES across its entire server line, including IBM eServer iSeries, pSeries, xSeries and zSeries as well as IBMs POWER-based BladeCenter systems.
Todays announcement follows on the heels of a similar deal announced on Tuesday by Red Hat Inc. With that agreement IBM will offer Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) on IBMs iSeries, pSeries and BladeCenter systems.
“Novell is working with companies like IBM to deliver the powerful, fully supported SuSE LINUX platform on leading enterprise servers,” said Novell CEO Jack Messman in a prepared statement. “Customers know that theyre getting top-quality performance backed by the global technical support and services they need from Novell. This marks a critical step in making Linux mainstream in the corporate data center.”
On the same day, Hewlett-Packard Co. announced that it would work with Novell to put Linux on the desktop and notebooks. Like the IBM deal, this is an extension of a previous deal that HP had with Novells SuSE division.
Martin Fink, HP vice president of Linux, indicated that a growth area for Linux in businesses may be found in applications for thin-clients, such as in a call center. Novell on Tuesday said it would pursue a thin-client Linux desktop solution.