In a recent writeup titled "Novell a Johnny come lately?", one guy reckons that Novell is late at the scene.

Novell is piggybacking on its recently announced Linux based partnership with Microsoft to promote its new Zenworks interoperable solution for the management of virtual machines in the corporate environment.

Industry analyst Richard Ptak, one of the principals in Ptak, Noel, & Associates said Novell's introduction of a "desktop to data center management solution" might have been significant if it had been announced "eighteen months or even one year ago" stated Ptak.

"Novell is not tops here, right. They are way behind where IBM and HP and EMC are in the breath and depth of solutions."

Offering management solutions for virtual machines is a new and hot market, but Novell is following in the footsteps of other already established players in the systems and server management marketplace that are specifically focused on virtualization, process management and asset management, Ptak explained.

"It is certainly good that they are in the marketplace. [Novell] talks about being able to manage Vista and Novell's version of SuSE Linux. But it doesn't really mean much in terms of the platform manageability."

Meanwhile, a few prominent bloggers ponder the meaning of DistroWatch figures. We pondered this ourselves several times before [1, 2, 3, 4].