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 Novell recently announced its Platinum partnership with Genovate to conduct certification programs in India. With this move, the company has entered the open source training market in the country. Sandeep Menon, Country Head, Novell India, talks about the recent happenings at the company with Harshal Kallyanpur, Correspondent, Network Computing. Excerpts from the interview:
Q. What is the kind of growth that Novell has seen over the past few years?
A. Novell has grown a lot in the past six quarters. IDC has estimated a quarter to quarter growth rate of 65% and a market growth of 35% globally for Linux. We have been doing a lot of acquisitions, with PlateSpin and SiteScape being the prominent ones in the last quarter.
Q. Can you elaborate more on these acquisitions?
A. PlateSpin provides data center virtualization management, interoperability, and data center relocation and disaster recovery solutions that will improve Novell’s open source virtualization solutions. SiteScape offers email, teaming and conferencing solutions that will increase Novell’s collaboration capabilities.
Q. You have three levels of partnership in India -- Gold, Silver, and Platinum -- with Genovate becoming the first Platinum partner. What differentiates your partners into Gold, Silver or Platinum levels?
A. It is just a way of differentiating a partner according to the services it is entitled to. For example, a Platinum partner would receive more set of deliverables, business support, technical and business training, and academic support at a certain pricing when compared to a Gold or Silver partner.
Q. Besides Genovate, do you have any other partners currently in India in the Gold or Silver category?
A. No, we don’t. We have just entered into the partnership with Genovate and, depending on our growth in the region, we will look at other partnerships.
Q. Who are your global partners?
A. We have three main relationships globally: with SAP, Microsoft and Accenture. SAP supports our OS, and support requests from SAP can be sent to SUSE and vice versa. We’ve partnered with Microsoft for cross-platform solutions that are required for virtualization. This cross-platform support provides interoperability on a single system. Accenture is providing services for high-level implementations for data centers and servers.
Q. What’s in store for the next one year?
A. We are looking to grow in the country through channel partners. We need marketing channels for multi-city events, training channels for virtualization. We are especially looking for services partners who also offer products.
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