Interoperability

The collaboration agreement that Microsoft and Novell signed in November 2006 has been nothing if not controversial. It caused consternation among some members of the free and open source software community and encouraged the Free Software Foundation to rewrite the forthcoming GPLv3 license.

At the heart of the agreement is a desire to unite, rather than divide, however, designed as it is to enable Windows and Linux to not only sit alongside each other in the data centre but also work together.

While both vendors would like to dominate their customers' computer systems the reality is mixed environments, and the collaboration agreement is an acknowledgement of that.

"As CEO of Microsoft, I certainly recognise that Linux plays an important role in the IT infrastructure of many of our customers, and will continue to play an important role," said Steve Ballmer at the agreement's announcement. "We have customers who use a mix of technologies to manage their businesses, and they demand strong interoperability amongst all their systems."

While it might seem extraordinary to hear Ballmer admitting that Microsoft's customers want to use Linux, it was not the first time. As far back as April 2005 Ballmer stood on stage at the Microsoft Management Summit in Las Vegas and demonstrated Linux running as a guest on Microsoft Virtual Server.

"As much as that hurts my eyes, I know that's an important capability for the Virtual Server technology for our customers," he joked at the time.

The agreement with Novell is therefore designed to take work that Microsoft and Novell had been doing separately to the next level, with the two companies working together to ensure tight interoperability by design.

"We've entered into a technical collaboration agreement to work together on key areas like virtualisation, management, and document format compatibility," added Ballmer at the launch. "We see huge potential upsides in these markets, and we believe the investment that we're making together in new solutions and interop will make our respective products more attractive to customers."

Like Microsoft, Novell has also been working independently on solutions that acknowledged that its SUSE Linux Enterprise operating system and other closed and open source technologies do not exist in isolation.

For example, the company has moved forward with the Mono project to bring Microsoft's .NET environment to Linux and Unix that it acquired along with Ximian, while its ZENworks systems management products enable the management of Windows systems, as well as Unix, Linux and NetWare.

"Our aspiration is that we are the best manager of Vista desktops, so that's part of what interoperability means to us," explained Novell's executive vice president and chief technology officer, Jeff Jaffe at its BrainShare user conference. "At the end of the day Microsoft is going to push for Windows, we are going to push for Linux, we will agree to disagree, but we will agree to get interoperability between the platforms."

Do not be misled into thinking that the companies have stopped competing, incidentally. "I'll say it now, you've got a new application that you want to instance, I'm going to tell you the right answer is Windows, Windows, Windows," said Ballmer.

"And Ron [Hovsepian, Novell president and CEO] is going to tell you something different, as you'll ask him, I won't even go there. And that's fine. But we both recognise the need for this interoperability. And so while we'll compete, we're also going to cooperate in the right way."

So what are the companies delivering that will improve interoperability for their customers? The first thing, perhaps, is an admission that they cannot be all things to all men.

"When you look at the customers' environments, that mixed source environment that they're dealing with brings a whole host of benefits in each one of the individual platforms while creating other complexities for our customers," explained Hovsepian.

"We talked and we said, we've got to get together and get our engineering teams aligned, we've got to get our marketing, our sales teams aligned, to really make sure that this message gets delivered properly, because we're balancing the competition that we're going to have with each other with the desire to make sure we help our customers and cooperate on the interoperability."

What that means in practice is cooperation on a number of technical areas, as well as a business marketing agreement, and of course that controversial patent element. While the covenant not to sue each other's customers for patent infringement has stirred up something of a hornet's nest within the open source community [for the latest on that, see here http://www.cbronline.com/article_news.asp?guid=486516F4-A7CF-4C09-922A-1CB470AC073C], it is designed specifically to take concerns over intellectual property away from end users, leaving them to focus on the fruits of that technical collaboration.

"On the technology collaboration there are three primary areas of technology collaboration. First and foremost is virtualisation," explained Jaffe at the announcement of the agreement. "The joint solution essentially means if you want to run your Linux workloads virtualised on top of Windows, we're going to create a joint solution which accomplishes that. SLES on Windows is going to be part of a joint solution, and comparably, if it's a Linux shop, but you have Windows applications that you'd like to run virtualised under Linux, we're going to work on that, as well."

February saw the companies provide more detail on their roadmap, promising to deliver on three virtualisation projects in 2007. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 will run as a virtualised guest on the forthcoming Service Pack 1 release of Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2, they said. The next version of Windows Server, will include new virtualisation technology -- codenamed Viridian -- that will also support SLES 10.

In return, Novell will be able to run Windows Server 2008 as a guest operating system running on the Xen hypervisor embedded within SLES 10, while Novell also announced that thanks to the development of device drivers with Intel, it is now able to run existing Windows Server 2000, 2003 and XP operating systems unmodified in Xen virtual environments on SLES using Intel's VT technology.

Another area of focus for the Novell-Microsoft partnership is web services-based systems management. "You have the heterogeneous world, you have Linux, you have Windows, which by the way describes almost every IT shop that I've seen, how do you manage that?" asked Jaffe.

"We're going to collaborate on web services management technologies, we're going to get great solutions for our customers. This is all customer-focused. As part of that people for a long time have wanted better interoperability between Novell's eDirectory and Microsoft's Active Directory. That will be another topic that we collaborate around."

Specifically Novell announced that it is working to develop an open source implementation of the Web Services for Management (WS-Management) specification, while both Novell ZENworks Orchestrator and Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 are expected to support WS-Management later this year.

The company's BrainShare event saw the demonstration of some of the first fruits of the agreement, with the companies demonstrating the use of WS-Federation to federate identities across eDirectory and Active Directory, and their associated applications - enabling the use of Novell Access Manager to authenticate to Sharepoint. They also demonstrated the ability to access files on a virtualised Windows environment from SLES and vice versa.

Another area of collaboration which has already borne fruit regards document format interoperability. That sees Novell working with the Microsoft-sponsored open source Open XML Translator project that enables Microsoft Office to read and write OpenDocument Format documents and OpenOffice.org to read and write Open XML.

Novell has already updated its version of the OpenOffice.org productivity suite with the Open XML Translator project, giving it the ability it to read Open XML documents.

According to Craig Mundie, Microsoft chief research and strategy officer, the deliverables are proof that the companies are facing up to the realities of their customers' environments. "We're really evolving into an environment where there are a couple of platforms, so by definition you can't really standardise everything," he said in a first ever appearance at Novell's BrainShare conference by a Microsoft executive.

"For the last few years as we've talked to the customer base and it became absolutely clear that they are going to have mixed environments, they really pushed on us a lot to resolve the interoperability question," he added.

"There are a lot of elements of the agreement between Microsoft and Novell that show that it is possible to build bridges between these two environments, and I think the bridges are not just interoperation at a distance, but in more pragmatic ways getting these things to coexist within the customer environment."

Added Jaffe: "Our objective is to give you the best of both worlds. We want to give you the version of Linux that is not only open but is totally enterprise ready. But there is a third thing that customers want; they want openness and industrial strength, but they also want interoperability, so we've added that third leg."

Customer approval for the interoperability agreement has been driven by another element of the agreement: Microsoft's purchase of $240m worth of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server subscription certificates, which it is distributing to joint customers.

According to Ballmer, the thought behind that agreement is to ensure that Microsoft customers running Linux are using an operating system that Microsoft knows it can interoperate with. "In terms of business cooperation from Microsoft's perspective, we definitely want those customers who are combining Windows and Linux to choose the Novell SUSE product line. And we're going to put our marketing behind that," he said.

"With Novell, those customers will benefit from the interoperability, the virtualisation scenarios, the management scenarios, that our two companies will work on, and because of the creative resolution of IP issues, Microsoft and Novell will really be able to add value and collaborate in a way that I think is very meaningful to our customers."

Microsoft has not only agreed to purchase the subscription coupons, but also spend $60m over five years marketing Linux and Windows virtualised scenarios and also $34m over the five year term of the agreement for a Microsoft sales force devoted primarily to marketing the combined offering.

That investment is already paying off. In December the companies signed up Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse and AIG Technologies as the first companies taking subscription certificates from Microsoft and redeeming them for SUSE Linux Enterprise upgrades, updates and technical support from Novell.

Retail giant Wal-Mart also signed up in January, followed by HSBC in March and no fewer than 12 companies -- 1blu, Arsys, Fujitsu Services , Gordon Food Service, Gulfstream Aerospace, hi5 Networks, Host Europe, Nationwide, PRISACOM, Reed Elsevier, Save Mart Supermarkets, and state of California, Department of Fish and Game -- in May.

In announcing Novell's recent financial results, Hovsepian announced that 49,000 of the 70,000 certificates Microsoft has agreed to distribute per year have already been activated. But why would a customer want to get Linux support certificates from Microsoft, when it could go directly to Novell for them?

Having signed up to the program, HSBC was prepared to explain its decision, noting that it was already in the process of standardising on Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise. "We've been looking at and using some Linux for a number of years, looking at a number of key distributions," said Matthew O'Neill, group head of distributed systems for HSBC global IT operations, adding that Linux is used to run third-party and in-house developed "business critical applications".

"We have a very robust process for bringing closed source or proprietary software into HSBC and what we wanted to ensure was just because something is open source it didn't stop us from following the normal due diligence that we had in place for other software," he explained, noting that ad hoc adoption techniques had led the company to be paying more to support its Linux machines than was necessary.

"We had a number of standard builds but more often than not a new application would come on board and we'd hand craft a build to be optimised to that particular application. That level of customisation actually increased our costs quite substantially not just from the initial build but from the ongoing management and maintenance of that too," he said.

"We regularly review how we price our technology internally and we determined that it was costing us more than it needed to to support our Linux environment. Really what the Microsoft and Novell deal did was provide us with a compelling event to sort that out."

While the decision had already been taken to standardise on Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, the company's interoperability agreement with Microsoft, combined with conversations HSBC was having with the software giant about virtualisation, made the support subscriptions a natural fit, said O'Neill.

"There was certainly a timing advantage, and given where we are with our investments with Microsoft it made sense," he said. "Having conversations with Novell and Microsoft at the table felt very comfortable."

While O'Neill would not reveal how many of the three-year priority support subscriptions HSBC has taken on, he did say that it covers "every Linux server I have," adding that HSBC would migrate to SLES as part of its normal infrastructure refresh cycle, known as "Evergreen", which sees systems refreshed every three years.

O'Neill also declined to comment on how much HSBC was paying for the subscriptions, other than to deny that it was getting them free of charge. "We are paying, and we are pleased with the price," he said. "The thing that's the most important for me is that it's created a compelling event to try and standardise."

As for the potential advantages of the interoperability agreement, O'Neill is looking for integration between authentication systems and virtualisation as early proof points. "We just completed the roll out of a global Active Directory infrastructure and as such every employee now has an Active Directory user account. We'd like that to be the key into as many of our other systems as we can so it helps us reduce the overhead we have in managing identity," he said.

"Another area is virtualisation and sharing of resources. At the moment we do a lot with Windows virtualisation and we haven't done so much with Linux virtualisation. We're looking to see whether there's opportunities to bring the two workloads together on the same server."

CBR Opinion
While the debate rages about the patent provisions of the agreement, the lack of fuss over the technical collaboration is indicative of the fact that it is solving a real industry need. It is still early days in terms of deliverables, but customer momentum behind the agreement indicates that users see the advantages of having Microsoft and Novell working together to solve technical problems rather than battling it out to own a customer outright.