Novell’s Nat Friedman Named Technologist of the Year

Novell’s Nat Friedman Named Technologist of the Year

VARBusiness Magazine has named Nat Friedman, Novell’s chief technology and strategy officer for open source, as its first ever Technologist of the Year. Friedman was honored for innovation in Novell’s most recent desktop Linux* offering, SUSE® Linux Enterprise Desktop 10, the first truly usable Linux desktop operating system for corporate environments. Shipped in August 2006 and named Best of Show at LinuxWorld* San Francisco in September, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 provides customers a compelling alternative to Windows* at a fraction of the price. VARBusiness, which covers the business of technology integration, honored Friedman at an awards ceremony held Oct. 23, 2006, in Huntington Beach, Calif.

“Innovative technologies always start with innovative individuals, so we decided this year, for the first time, to honor a technologist of the year, rather than simply technologies and products. Innovations like what we’ve seen from Nat Friedman demonstrate the vibrancy and vitality of the industry,” says VARBusiness Editor Lawrence M. Walsh. “They represent breakthroughs that will benefit our solution-provider readers and, in turn, the users of technology.”

SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop delivers ease of use and features new to the desktop operating system market, including 3-dimensional desktop effects, integrated desktop and web search, complete multimedia support, plug-and-play capabilities, interoperability with Microsoft* Active Directory* and Exchange environments, and an office productivity suite, fully compatible with Microsoft Office, through the Novell® edition of OpenOffice.org 2.0. SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop can serve as a complete end-user desktop replacement, retail point of service solution, thin-client deployment or engineering workstation.

“It’s a tremendous honor to receive this award, but this was a group effort. I am proud to share this honor not only with our team of great engineers at Novell, including the SUSE team, but also the open source community that has built the Linux desktop and supported our own innovative contributions,” said Friedman. “SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 is a perfect example of how corporate contributions can drive innovation in the open source world. The real winners, of course, are the customers who can now get a secure, reliable desktop and cutting-edge features, all at one-tenth the cost of proprietary desktops.”

Read the complete Press Release