Novell's Fight for Respect

Novell's Fight for Respect: "Are things at Novell better than it appears from the outside?
[Novell president Ron Hovsepian:] Absolutely. Our core Linux business grew 20% quarter-over-quarter. Why? Our strategy is different than Red Hat's. They are approaching this as an edge server play, and it's an enterprise play. [In other words, Novell sells Linux as part of large company-wide deals, not just to run on individual servers.] We are making extra investments in Linux on the desktop and [products for retail] point of sale and banking that we think are going to be very successful. Desktop revenue grew 100% last quarter. Granted it's still a small sub segment. Customers want to buy an enterprise story [that includes] servers, desktops, and all those pieces. We are focusing the company on building that strategy. Target (TGT) picked us over Red Hat, and they picked us because we had an enterprise story.
What about Red Hat? They had a great run last year, then surprised and delighted analysts again by doing the gutsy acquisition of Jboss (see BW Online, 04/11/06, 'Red Hat's Red-Hot Deal'). How does that affect you?
I think it'll have a positive impact on us, but that will be seen over time. We've really focused on what we do well: dealing with mixed environments (where there's Linux and traditional software). What Red Hat did (when it bought Jboss) was poke IBM and Oracle right in the eye and said: 'We're going to go after this application server market.'"