SMBs, the hot market for Linux

Suse Linux's chief technology officer Juergen Geck has been instrumental in
building strong tie-ups with partners AMD, Fuji-tsu-Siemens Computers, HP, IBM,
Oracle, and SAP. A nine-year veteran with the open source company, he has also
helped design Suse's flagship product Suse Linux Enterprise Server-the first
enter-prise Linux offering in the market-and its mainte-nance model. In an
interview to Bhaswati Chakravorty of Dataquest, he sheds light on how Suse Linux
stands to benefit after being acquired by Novell and how the Indian Linux market
is shaping up.

How does Suse stand to benefit from Novell's acquisition?

The main objective of the acquisition was to combine Novell's global
presence and deep knowledge of enterprise software with Suse Linux's powerful
technology to make Novell one of the strongest options for enterprise Linux.
Novell has always been championing open source and Linux. Post the acqui-sition,
Novell customers who are interested in deploying Linux, whether in the
data-center or on the desktop, can now turn to Novell while Suse will get the
advantage of Novell's global marketing and sales strategy to make deeper
inroads into markets.

How well is the Linux market in India growing?

Traditionally, India is a pricesensitive market. The-refore, it comes a no
sur-prise that there is a lot of excitement among CIOs regarding Linux. There is
a steady adoption of Linux at educational institutions. The government is also
showing a lot of interest in Linux and we see this as a major growth vertical
for us. We are also seeing increased interest from enterprise cus-tomers to
migrate to Linux. We are targeting the SMB as we see huge potential for growth
in this segment. We are very optimistic about the Indian market.

We are working jointly with our hardware and soft-ware partners to offer the
right solutions to different segments trying to adopt Linux. Our strategy is to
position Linux as an ideal platform for running mission-critical applications,
not just edge applications. We also believe that training and education is an
integral part of our Linux strategy and we are offering courses through Onward
Novell's network of Novell Authorized Education Partners.

Can you elaborate on Project Mono?

Project Mono is a commu-nity initiative to develop a Linux/OSS version of a
run-time engine that will be able to run .Net applications built on Linux,
Windows, and Unix platforms. The goal is to add the C# language to the arsenal
of open source development tools and allow the creation of ope-rating
system-independent .Net programs.