Novell and IBM News

Continuing our Novell Week, one LinuxWorld announcement tied Novell and IBM together for new products aimed at small and medium businesses. This collaboration isn’t surprising, because IBM has supported Novell closely for many years with hardware. In addition, IBM jumped out of the local area network operating system years ago, making it easier to partner with Novell than when IBM had their own LAN to peddle.

Saying “IBM, Novell team to fuel SMB Linux adoption” makes a great headline, but I wonder about some of their options. Their first product package includes “IBM’s DB2 Express-C database server, a free, scaled-down version of its DB2 Universal Database Express Edition.” How can a small business live without a version of IBM’s mainframe database? And the joke on the original DB2 was IBM could give it away for free and still get rich off the support fees. Is this really appropriate for small to medium businesses? How much market share does Baby DB2 have? Maybe this is more about boosting IBM’s market share.

The other trend from Novell and LinuxWorld running now in Boston? More nonsense about Novell’s SuSE Linux Desktop becoming the “Windows killer” the Linux world dreams of. Novell tried that in the 90s and it blew up in their faces. Since then, the graveyards are full of smaller companies challenging Microsoft. Novell couldn’t beat them head-on when they were close to the same size, and they certainly haven’t gotten smarter this past decade. Give up that dream, Novellians, and provide a solid NetWare replacement your customers can embrace before it’s too late