Microsoft and Novell Announce Technical Collaboration for Customers

Microsoft and Novell Announce Technical Collaboration for Customers

Microsoft Corp. and Novell today unveiled more details about their joint technical roadmap and the benefits customers can expect from the collaboration. Microsoft and Novell are engaged in joint development on four areas of technology that address significant problems faced by enterprise customers today: virtualization, Web services for managing physical and virtual servers, directory and identity interoperability, and document format compatibility.

“With this first installment of the Microsoft-Novell development roadmap, we see that both companies are building on this relationship to develop real, product-specific solutions to deliver on the promises made to customers,” said Al Gillen, research vice president, System Software, for IDC. “The great potential of the November announcement between Microsoft and Novell could have been disappointing without a product-specific roadmap to execute against. With the roadmap, the technology benefits customers can expect will be tangible and delivered on a predictable basis.”

Web Services-Based Management: Microsoft and Novell are working with the community to make it easier for customers to manage their mixed Windows and SUSE Linux Enterprise physical and virtual environments by collaborating on standards-based solutions that provide exceptional scalability and flexibility in managing heterogeneous environments.

The Web Services for Management (WS-Management) specification supports the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) initiative to expose model-agnostic management resources via a set of Web services protocols. Novell is working with the open source community to develop an open source implementation of the WS-Management specification. Novell ZENworks® Orchestrator and Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 will incorporate WS-Management this year.

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