IT veteran achieves perfect Zen through open source
Submitted by srlinuxx on Thu, 08/28/2008 - 04:30.
Utah software company Novell employs 150 people in Dublin. The advent of open source software, particularly Linux, gave this long-standing IT giant a new lease of life. Ron Hovsepian is the company’s CEO.
AFTER dominating the network software world, Novell lost its way in the Nineties before embracing open source to get back on track. How is this strategy proceeding?
I give my predecessors all the credit for that. Ten years ago the right decisions were made and we’re now looking at the third generation of this technology.
In the past year we’ve added 8,700 customers, which is an important testament to where the team is going and the relevance of the products in the marketplace.
Approximately 20pc of our turnover goes into R&D, which is above the industry standard.
The move to open source coincided with the arrival of virtualisation, one of the biggest changes in enterprise computing. But is the business world embracing it?
Novell gradually becomes Mcrcosoft
FTA: "It’s going very well insofar as we originally agreed to co-operate on three distinct projects and now we’re working on nine projects and there’s a good list of 19 other projects that we plan to co-operate on."
How long before it just makes sense for Microsoft to buy Novell, which already supports all of its proprietary technologies. Microsoft's recent moves towards Utah are interesting too (i gave two examples in the past week.