Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 29th Apr 2011 22:06 UTC, submitted by sjvn
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2007-03-07
I don't see Canonical as being competition to Attachmate. Novell basically had four main competitors: Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, and Red Hat. Of these five vendors, Novell was probably the weakest because they are the furthest from being able to provide a full stack solution. By that, I mean they are the furthest from being be able to provide a single vendor point of contact for support.
In the open source world, we often like to tout freedom of choice as one of the benefits. However, if you are running a mission critical application that you need vendor support for, building different parts of your stack on software provided by different vendors can get dicey when it comes to support. If something breaks in your data access layer for example, who's problem is it? The database vendor's? The application server vendor's? The ORM framework vendor's? If your entire stack is from one vendor, there can be no ambiguity about who's problem it is when something goes wrong, and who is responsible for supporting it.
Of the five vendors I mentioned above, currently, only Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM are capable of providing a full stack:
Microsoft has .NET, MS SQL Server, IIS, and Windows Server 2008. Oracle, thanks to the Sun purchase, has two Java EE application servers, (Glassfish and WebLogic), Oracle and MySQL databases, and Solaris. IBM has AIX, a Java EE application server (WebSphere), and the DB2 database.
RedHat comes close, in that they provide a supported OS and a Java EE application server (JBoss). But they need to buy up a database vendor. Red Hat should have bought MySQL, but in the past they have been hesitant to provide their own database because they wanted to appear database vendor neutral. But now that Oracle owns Sun, that's not going to fly anymore. Oracle is obviously going to push the Solaris / Oracle combo, and discourage the Linux / Oracle combo.
And then we have SUSE, which is sort of left without any kind of stack at all.
Alas, it is too bad that VMWare didn't buy Novell. That would have raised some eyebrows and probably caused a little bit of nervousness at Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, and Red Hat. A VMWare purchase of Novell would have been very interesting indeed.
Edited 2011-05-01 01:05 UTC