Okay,...massive speculation here, be forwarned. One of the common trends within Novell's Ximian & SuSE aquisitions is MS Exchange compatability and transitioning (which let's face it, is a pretty daunting prospect and a likley stumbling block for transparent switchovers).
SuSE is definitely a player in the e-mial end of things, particlarly with respect to their Enterprise Mail server (which if memory serves also provides some services for Outlook users). Great product with awesome potential in the back end. Now, Ximian on the other hand has a piece of software which allows Linux clients like Ximian's Evolution project to access MS Exchange relatively transparently. Having access to BOTH these technologies, put's Novell in a rather nice spot to satify, both back-first and front-first Linux transition strategies. Change the MS clients/keep the MS back end (who knows why, but I'm sure there are reasons), as well as change the back end, keep the MS clients. With all this technology under one roof together with SuSE Linux Enterprise offerings for bigger iron as well as Novell's own offerings, with the added bounus of ::mono (perhaps rolled into the enterprise offerings for limitted .Net functionality) ....it's starting to shape up like a VERY potent package. The fact that IBM got behind them as quickly as they did, suggests to me that they're onto something. Perhaps there are bit's that bring it all together even more, but as ti stands, it appears to be a something that is more than the the sum of it's parts. Tomorrow should be interesting. The timing is extrodrinary. Michael offered to speak last month, but I already had commitments from a number of the presenters for our mini-talks last month and asked him to present this month, which he was quite happy to do. Should be a hoot! see you there. Marcel On Tue, 2003-11-04 at 10:05, Ian Bruseker wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > On November 4, 2003 8:11 am, Kevin Anderson wrote: > <snip> > > Dear Novell. > > You hold the best products on the face of the networking earth. Please > > tell someone that they are for sale, and they can be bought from you. I'll > > be ROYALLY pissed off if this just manages to kill SUSE by ending any > > marketing of it. Ditto for NDS, Groupwise, and ZEN. > > Thanks. > > > Ya, this makes me a little apprehensive too (in ref. to your comment about > marketing it). Let's hope they don't WordPerfect it. > > I also wonder if they're heading for other trouble - first they buy Ximian and > all their GNOME-ishness, and now they buy SuSE, one of the bigger KDE > supporters? Are they trying to start an internal war? ;-) But seriously, > they aren't going to do a bluecurve, are they? > > I guess we'll see how the next few months shake out. > > Ian > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- > Version: GnuPG v1.0.7 (GNU/Linux) > > iD8DBQE/p9xiSiY+RXI7JS4RAtVEAKD4cs/Zl03p0RPW1pbll9M6deKn8wCgk2Qd > gJ2XM3VcnozBVOwpOE3mnIc= > =rSVD > -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- Marcel Lecker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
