| Novell, Capgemini, and the rise of corporate Linux |
Jun. 07, 2007
Novell didn't win many friends in the open-source community with its Microsoft partnership. However, that deal, along with Novell's growing partnerships with enterprise software players such as SAP and now Capgemini are bound to win it friends in big business.
On June 5, Capgemini, a major global consulting and outsourcing services company, and Novell announced a broad partnership that aim to deliver new software and services to enterprise customers using a combination of open-source and proprietary software. Under the terms of the agreement, Capgemini will enhance its open-source consulting practice with Novell capabilities. Specifically, Capgemini will start deploying IT technology using both SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Desktop along with mixed-source applications and management tools.
"We are pleased to enter into this partnership with Novell," said Paul Hermelin, Capgemini CEO, in a statement. "Every day we hear from more customers that open source is becoming a critical part of their IT strategy as they seek choice and value. Capgemini prides itself on its ability to help customers identify and deploy mission-critical technologies that will help them improve their IT infrastructure effectiveness, and this partnership with Novell is critical to fulfilling these needs. Novell, through its SUSE Linux Enterprise platform and ZENworks management suite, is a key vendor offering a complete solution."
With this partnership, Capgemini's customers gain fully supported mixed-source technologies built on open-source and proprietary software that Capgemini will help build, deploy and maintain. The Capgemini Open Source practice will help customers define enterprise open-source governance and select the right open-source software to deploy on top of a flexible, fully supported Novell platform that delivers optimized performance.
In addition, Novell open-source software will be supported via Capgemini's open-source Support Service Center (OSSPartner) offering. Novell plans to provide Level 3 support to Capgemini and its customers.
"Among the global leaders in systems integration, Capgemini continues to lead and innovate in the consulting industry," said Ron Hovsepian, Novell's president and CEO, in a statement. "With today's announcement, Capgemini makes a strong commitment to build the best solution for their customers with a flexible combination of open source and proprietary software. We're thrilled to be working with Capgemini to deliver true mixed-source solutions to help customers lower cost, reduce complexity and mitigate risk on their desktops and in their data centers."
The two companies will be working together to satisfy customer needs in three areas: - Integrated development tools and application stacks. Novell will provide SUSE Linux Enterprise plus proprietary systems management software and development tools to enable Capgemini to design, develop, deploy, and maintain business applications based on mixed-source software installations integrated with Capgemini's middleware and Web application frameworks.
- End-user system deployments based on the Linux desktop. To help customers identify key opportunities for Linux desktops and then implement those migrations, Capgemini will enhance its consulting practice with capabilities based on the deployment of Novell's award-winning SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, which includes an office productivity suite, integrated search engine and complete Microsoft Windows interoperability.
- Data center virtualization and management. Capgemini will offer customers software based on Novell ZENworks Orchestrator to help them optimize their virtualized data centers using ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library, an IT services best practice model)-based tools that automate the deployment, use and management of both physical and virtual IT resources based on business policies.
-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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