By Ramdas S
Following its move to a partner-centric business model, Novell India’s next target is to empower partners to go after large customers using Microsoft platform and migrate them to Suse Linux.
“We see a huge migration market in the desktop Linux segment. We expect a number of users to upgrade from XP to Windows 7, but the transition, however compelling, is going to be neither smooth nor inexpensive. We’re equipping our partners to offer the Novell Suse Enterprise platform at rates which would be a fraction of the cost of migrating to Windows 7,” said Sandeep Menon, Country Director, Novell India.
Novell estimates that while Microsoft’s basic OS platform, along with Office productivity tools, costs a large enterprise approximately $300 per desktop, a similar set of solutions based on Suse Linux costs around $50 per desktop including a year of support, and open source software and tools.
“More than the price advantage, we want customers and partners to realize that we are the only Linux vendor to offer an entire stack of products which can replace the Windows platform in an enterprise,” said Menon. “Apart from Suse Linux and Novell Open Office, which can replace the basic Windows OS and MS Office, we can offer Novell eDirectory and Novell Groupwise which are great alternatives to Active Directory and MS Exchange.”
Novell estimates the size of the paid enterprise desktop Linux market to be 5 percent that of the licensed Windows OS market. “We have 80 percent of the desktop Linux market in India. However, this is a small chunk of the overall licensed desktop market, so our aim is to aggressively tap this market,” added Menon.
Novell is committing full pre and post-sales support to partners. “We realize that our partners require back-to-back support when they implement our solutions, hence we are offering unlimited support calls to partners who are committed to a certain volume of business,” Menon stated. |