Microsoft, SUSE Renew Successful Interoperability Agreement

Microsoft Corp. and SUSE, an independent business unit of The Attachmate Group Inc., have announced a four-year extension of the groundbreaking agreement struck nearly five years ago between Microsoft and Novell Inc. for broad collaboration on Windows and Linux interoperability and support. This relationship will extend through Jan. 1, 2016, with Microsoft committed to invest $100 million in new SUSE Linux Enterprise certificates for customers receiving Linux support from SUSE.

As IT operating environments become increasingly consumerised, cloud-based and automated, there is an implicit expectation that the underlying technologies from multiple vendors should work together. For this reason, the collaborative relationship between Microsoft and SUSE has come to be viewed as a model for the industry.

The joint Microsoft-SUSE collaboration has served more than 725 customers worldwide across a range of industries, such as manufacturing, oil and gas, healthcare, and financial services. In addition, through this alliance, SUSE enables customers to consolidate their Linux support by offering subscription support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and community Linux distributions such as CentOS.

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Microsoft and SUSE also have driven significant opportunities for partners that have leveraged the companies’ collaboration as a means of meeting their own customers’ demand for interoperability.
Microsoft and SUSE have built a bridge for customers between the two worlds of open source and proprietary software. As this collaboration moves forward, the two companies will continue to offer the highest levels of interoperability and assurance that both companies stand behind their solutions.

“Our collaboration with SUSE not only helps customers to achieve success today, but also seeks to provide them with a solid foundation for tomorrow,” said Sandy Gupta, general manager of the Open Solutions Group at Microsoft. “Through our continued engagement on the technical side, an outstanding support offering from SUSE and our ability to provide mutual IP assurance, we feel confident that we will be able to deliver core value to those running mixed-source IT environments well into the future — and into the cloud.”

“We’re pleased to extend our long-term relationship with Microsoft,” said Michael Miller, vice president, Global Alliances and Marketing, SUSE. “Our mutual commitment to help organisations make the most of mixed Linux and Windows Server environments is what has made this collaboration successful. We will continue to work with Microsoft to deliver solutions that enable our joint customers to manage critical workloads in mixed-source environments across a wide range of computing models, including private, hybrid and full-cloud implementations.”

Microsoft and SUSE also will continue their technical collaboration on solutions to help customers work more efficiently in the areas of cloud, virtualisation and manageability. One such example is through the combination of a cross-platform solution with Microsoft Hyper-V Cloud and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, giving IT managers a robust solution to migrate to a private cloud architecture. The companies also plan to extend Microsoft System Center through integration with SUSE Manager and select technologies to enhance Linux deployment, patching and updating.