02.25.12
SUSE: Brain Drain, Partners Down the Drain
Summary: A look at the state of SUSE about a year after the sale of Novell
THE RECENT anniversary of SUSE (the company) is still being mentioned in some news sites and there is a discussion about an ARM port of OpenSUSE (Ubuntu and derivatives won the x86 space). Other than that, everything is quiet. The VAR Guy makes news out of nothing by speaking about SUSE partners — unnamed partners other than Microsoft:
Despite SUSE’s progress, plenty of challenges remain. Attachmate is privately held and doesn’t disclose financial results, so it’s unclear if SUSE-related profits are growing. Plus, some customers and partners lost faith in SUSE during the long Novell sale process, which consumed much of late 2010. And many Novell managers, some of which focused on SUSE, exited the company upon the Attachmate buyout. Net result: SUSE partners and customers had to navigate a lot of change in 2011.
Meanwhile, rival Red Hat continues to gain momentum on multiple fronts — promoting Linux, Jboss open source middleware, open source storage, open source virtualization and cloud computing, just to name a few. Red Hat is expected to deliver another round of strong quarterly results when it announces financials on March 21, 2012.
This was expected by us. Except for this press release, there is no news from SUSE. It merely talks about support from a developer, not a new client. To quote: “Azul Systems, the award-winning leader in Java runtime scalability, today announced the general availability of Zing 5 with support for an additional Linux distribution. Effective immediately, the Zing Java Virtual Machine (JVM) is now fully qualified on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11.”
Here is an article about it. To quote:
Azul Systems has announced general availability of Zing 5 with support for an additional Linux distribution. Effective immediately, the Zing Java Virtual Machine (JVM) is now fully qualified on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11.
But will anyone choose "Microsoft Linux" to run this on? We are sceptical. Some will, but not many. Several years ago SUSE got some major clients, but we don’t hear such stories anymore. █
