SUSE Linux is reducing its UK and Ireland resellers in order to pool efforts behind top partners only. Reducing the number of current resellers by two thirds, Brian Green, UK and Ireland managing director at SUSE looks to back partners that can help wrest market share from larger rival Red Hat.
Green earmarked big datacentre projects in the city as a key battleground for SUSE and its channel.
“We are very customer driven in that we believe in open flexibility as well as open source,” he said. “We are in a great position as we are the preferred Linux distributor for both VMware and Microsoft, which have 80 per cent of the [virtualisation] hypervisor market between them. We are looking to invest more resources in these [VMware and Microsoft] partners that can get us into these fights.”
SUSE – which has a global turnover of $190m – was split out from Novell following the closure of its parent’s acquisition by Attachmate in April.
“Unleashing the SUSE brand enables us to be much clearer in the way we articulate our message to the channel and customers,” he said. “More importantly, partners now know exactly who to interact with in the Attachmate Group in relation to the Linux opportunity. If you are in a competitive situation and need to be creative commercially, the speed is that much faster as we have taken away those layers.”
In July, Microsoft committed another $100m investment in SUSE Linux for collaboration on Windows and Linux interoperability support. Green said the investment should eradicate any nagging doubts over whether or not Attachmate is committed to Novell’s products.
“A $60bn software company has just invested $100m in the future of SUSE, on an exclusive basis, until January 2016 – this is not a bad endorsement that they think our products are going to be around for some time,” he said.
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