BusinessWeek: Novell’s Fight for Respect

“In many ways, Novell is a lot like many other midsize software
companies. All are struggling to reinvent themselves in a world
where big deals are being won mainly by the likes of Oracle, IBM
and SAP–and where business models are being upended by such trends
as open source and so-called ‘software as a service,’ where vendors
make wares accessible over the Internet and rely more on monthly
subscriptions than up-front license fees.

“But Novell has had a key advantage over its peers. In 2003, it
acquired Germany’s Suse Linux, then second only to Red Hat in
supporting and installing Linux, the free operating system that
runs on more than a quarter of the world’s servers and is slowly
making inroads on desktops and other areas…”

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