Novell and Markus Rex: Reinventing An Empire

Chase Crum — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 12:00:00 +0000

In the 1990's Novell's NetWare dominated the networking industry with over 70% of the global market share. Their technical certifications were the industry's gold standard and offered titles such as Certified Novell Engineer, Master Certified Novell Engineer, Certified Novell Directory Engineer, and Novell Administrator. Just ten years later, the networking giant of the 20th century would find itself in a struggle to maintain relevance in the new millennium. The solution came as a change in strategy that would shift the company's focus from networking technologies to low level software and a new venture into an open sourced operating system of their own.

Microsoft's networking technologies had become increasingly prevalent with the successes of the NT platform and a shift in development from its more desktop centric operating systems to the more enterprise oriented Windows 2000. With the battle for networking technology all but lost, Novell fell back on its low level software development and in an effort to compete with Microsoft's Office suite, acquired WordPerfect. In 1996, Novell ended up selling WordPerfect to Corel when it couldn't gain market share. Ironically, it would be the acquisition of German based SuSe Linux in 2004 that would put Novell back in the ring with the operating system that had nearly wiped them out a few years prior.

Markus Rex joined Novell during the acquisition process of SuSe Linux in 2004. Six years later, he is Novell's Senior Vice President and General Manager of Open Source Solutions, and a LinuxCon keynote speaker. The Renaissance Hotel's Pacific conference room was well past seating capacity before the scheduled 8:00 am address, with standing room at a premium by the time he took the stage. In a presentation entitled “Empowering the Imagination For Tomorrow's Linux Workloads”, Markus made one thing clear: He is VERY excited about Linux. In an interview later that afternoon, Markus explained the dynamics behind his company's shift in strategy, his love for Linux and his thoughts on the Linux community at large.

I asked Markus if SUSE (now without the lowercase letters) had a strategy to compete with Canonical's success with their Linux Desktop, Ubuntu. To put it simply, they don't see the need for one. He credits Canonical for creating a desktop distribution that he described as being “slick”. It was agreed that their notoriety was derived from its appealing desktop and its vast hardware compatibility. He says this to demonstrate the key difference between Ubuntu and SUSE Linux. SUSE's main focus has always been server infrastructure. He pointed out that servers very rarely come with sound cards or high end graphics capabilities that desktop users look for when shopping for a Linux distribution. SUSE's main focus has been concentrating on stability and functionality. As a result, SUSE Linux boasts more certified applications than any other distribution in existence today.

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Novell and Markus Rex: Reinventing An Empire