At the beginning of this year (2005), Novell's market penetration in
China was essentially zero. Now it is the No. 1 Linux provider there.
China has a handful of Linux-based companies, such as Turbo Linux, Red
Flag, Asiaux, etc. All of them are very small (less than 200
employees). Most of them live on government contracts, and are too
small to push Linux (marketing) in China. Novell's aggressive
activities may soon change everything.
Earlier this year, Novell recruited Dr. Zhang Xian-Min (Mechanical
Engineering Ph.D. from University of Iowa, a self-proclaimed Linux
zealot) from IBM to be the head of its China subsidiary. This was then
followed by a visit ("camping" may be a better word) by the entire
Novell executive team.
In short, Novell seems to be doing quite well in China. Also, I don't
know whether it was by design or simply a coincidence, there are quite a
few SuSE servers that are running, or planned to be run, on Sun's
Opteron machines. Sun's Enterprise Resources Institute in Beijing seems
to be more interested in GNOME/JDS than on Solaris. Both Sun and Novell
contribute heavily on OpenOffice.org.
Just a few random observations. Wayne
