SALT LAKE CITY -- After years of hostility, Novell welcomed Microsoft for the first time to its annual BrainShare user conference to discuss implications of the vendors’controversial technology interoperability agreement.

“I will tell you as the CEO of this corporation, it was done for one reason, and that was for the customers," said Ron Hovsepian, Novell’s CEO and president, at Tuesday’s event. "We can make up all the noise we want around the edge of this thing, but it was all about driving customers … to make their lives easier and to deliver interoperability."

Hovsepian outlined the scope of the agreement, and Novell’s new commitment to interoperability, to approximately 5,000 attendees.

“That doesn’t mean that I don’t want you to build your footprints over in the J2EE environment – I do – but when we get done with that fight with Microsoft in your office, we’re both going to get together and help you deliver that footprint,” Hovsepian said.

According to the agreement, Novell and Microsoft will pursue interoperability in four areas: virtualization, Web services-based management, directory and identity interoperability, and document format compatibility. Throughout this year the two vendors will introduce technology that lets SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 run as a guest operating system on Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 Service Pack 1 and Longhorn, and lets Longhorn run as a paravirtualized guest on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, using the Xen hypervisor.

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