Novell Execs: Microsoft Partnership Is Working Out Just Fine

Novell executives are ending 2007 by praising their own decision last year to form an alliance with Microsoft - - a deal aimed at providing interoperatiblity between Windows and Linux.

Both John Dragoon, Novell's chief marketing officer, and Jeff Jaffe, Novell's CTO, offer up blog posts today on the subject - - both praising the results of the arrangement with their one-time enemy from Redmond.

"Linux and Open Source technologies continue their advancement into today's data centers where according to Gartner, 67 percent of data centers run some combination of Linux and Windows," Dragoon wrote. "Serving this growing market reality was the driving catalyst behind our interoperability partnership with Microsoft."

Jaffe offered up a much lengthier description, along with a promise to shortly unveil Novell's 2008 technology roadmap. Among other things, he writes:

Those are several reasons Novell executives believe the deal with Microsoft has been beneficial. Although critics of Novell and Microsoft may point to 355.6 million more reasons Novell likes the deal. According to Novell's recent 10-K annual report, "During fiscal 2007, we received $355.6 million from Microsoft related to the Microsoft agreements discussed above, which is being recognized over future periods."