Sandy Gupta, General Manager Open Solutions Group: Windows-Linux collaboration opens next chapter of the cross-platform interoperability story

I’m happy to share news today that Microsoft has formally extended the strategic Windows-Linux interoperability collaboration we previously had with Novell to SUSE.

I personally am excited by the prospect of SUSE’s newfound agility and focus as an independent business unit of The Attachmate Group, and the opportunity to evolve the interoperability work between our companies into new areas that will drive value for our joint customers.

I have met directly with an impressive number of IT executives around the world over the past 12 months who have spoken highly of the solutions we have delivered jointly with SUSE to their organizations which address priority problems – whether it be different workloads such as HPC, solutions for virtualization, and/or management within a heterogeneous data center environment.

The vast majority of these individuals have requested that we continue our collaboration work with SUSE, as well as consider expanding the scope into new areas. A great many have taken advantage of the expanded support offering, recognizing the efficiencies they could gain by standardizing their Linux platform distributions. They also see tremendous value in complementary management tools we have been able to bring to the table through our work with BridgeWays.

Surveying the progress we have made over the past five years, I expect our technical collaboration specific to cross-platform virtualization and systems management will serve as a critical building block in the very heterogeneous world that exists within today’s data center as we strive to help our customers embrace the Cloud. 

This extension of our agreement with SUSE comes at an appropriate time. Organizations today are transitioning to increased level IT automation in the form of Cloud infrastructure and assume multi-vendor solutions are integrated and operate smoothly, enabling them to deliver consistent interfaces and service level agreements to their end users.

Today’s announcement is a response to sentiments expressed by customers far and wide that Microsoft and SUSE begin crafting the next chapter of the cross-platform interoperability story. I look forward to seeing the renewal of this relationship take shape over the next four years, and encourage you to keep your eyes on Microsoft and SUSE 2.0.

Posted by Sandy Gupta
General Manager, Open Solutions Group Microsoft Corporation