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July 13, 2008

Linux News Today keeps getting more and more reports that overall, knowledgeable people and tech support personnel that know Linux inside out are still a major stumbling block in South Africa and other African markets. However, there are still some rays of hope.

Michelle Beetar, country manager for Novell SA took over as Novell's South African head in January, and says that the market has been a little slower in its uptake of Linux than expected but growth in the sector is still constant.

Beetar added that “there is still significant insecurity about Linux skills in the market, but that participants want to learn more”.

She says that while Novell is seeing the demand for Linux increasing, she still estimates that local market demand is around one year-and-a-half behind that of the larger, more established markets such as the United States.

Beetar says that there is growing demand from government for open source solutions because of its declared open source strategy, but she is also concerned that there is still some misinformation around free and open source software in government.

Beetar says that the company regularly has to explain why they charge a fee for Suse Linux Enterprise when many other distributions are free.

Novell South Africa is also seeing some respectable growth in the private sector as well. “One of the advantages we have, is that here in South Africa we have some of the best reference sites for Linux including the likes of SARS and FNB.”

Beetar added “today, we’re now having the discussions internally and with customers that other people in Novell were having as far back as October 2006.”

For many years, Novell’s roots have always been in the networking industry providing network hardware and later networking software including its flagship Novell NetWare. In the mid-1990s, Novell extended its reach with Web-enabled networking services and products such as Novell Cluster Services.

But in late 1999 the company had all been outmarketed by Microsoft who had knocked Novell from its top spot in data centers. Over the next few years, in an effort to remain in the game, Novell expanded its consulting services, web services and directory services.

However, the reality of it all is that “no CIO is going open source completely. Novell will be operating in a mixed software environment for a few more years yet," said Beetar.

Rheinhardt Esau, open platform systems specialist at Novell says "for us, that's a major advantage. While most organizations won’t switch wholesale to Linux they will often switch part of their infrastructure to Linux. Then, when the organization is accustomed to Linux other portions of the Novell stack can also be migrated to the Linux platform.

It was already five years ago when Novell started to get into the open source space. It initially purchased Ximian, a Linux shop making open source email and software management tools. Four years ago, Novell sealed its interest in open source with the purchase of Suse Linux, one of the premier Linux distributions of the time.

In doing that, Novell almost overnight established itself as a major player in the Linux sector, albeit a controversial one. It’s 2006 patent pact with Microsoft didn’t win it many fans among the open source community but, as Beetar points out, “for customers the Microsoft deal was fantastic, since it offered the best of both worlds”.

Despite what seemed like a massive shift from its old focus to a Linux-based one, Novell today still counts network collaboration, security and resource management among its key areas of growth, not all that different to what it has always been.

Beetar, who previously worked for M-Web and Oracle and admits to a primarily proprietary software background, says the shift to using open source software has been an easier transition than she expected.

Source: Novell.

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