Open Source and Linux specialist Novell has declared a drop in sales and profit during third quarter of the current year. It has seen lots of up-downs. Once up on time it was the networking operating system powerhouse, and then tried to be a consulting company and now they are open source and Linux Company.

VMware is virtualization company for the past years. But now because of completion in the virtualization business they are struggling. And Novell is losing its business because of lots of reasons. According to Wall Street Journal Novell is in advance talk with two different companies to sell of their whole division. VMware is planning to buy Novell’s open source SUSE Linux operating system business and Attachmate; a private equity fund company will buy the remaining assets. Novel is already partner with VMware to make sure the preferred operating system for VMware’s virtualization stack, but now it will buy SUSE Linux division. The deal is getting delayed because both companies are planning on how to divide Novel’s sales force, its patents and other properties. There are many reasons why VMware has decided to purchase SUSE Linux Operating system, among which the main reasons are to compete Red Hat & Microsoft. Here are discussed five main reasons due to which VMware may plan to buy Novel’s SUSE Linux operation system.

VMware’s PaaS strategy for cloud computing is designed to give options to organizations to deploy java applications for cloud providers, but VMware’s own OS JeOS was not sure to bet. So the logical answer to these problems is SUSE Linux.

  1. To Compete Red hat:
    As per current market trend Red Hat CEO Whitehurst believes that, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) can eventually bring down VMware the way Linux toppled the traditional UNIX market. There are some issues with RHEV, an open source Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM). But it will take time for Red Hat to strengthen RHEV that match VMware management tools. So VMware can use SUSE Linux to attack Red Hat’s Core Linux Business.
  2. To Compete Microsoft:
    Microsoft’s Hyper V is affecting VMware’s core virtualization business. But with this deal VMware will favour its position in the market by offering an open source email system – Zimbra to compete Microsoft Exchange. At longer period of time SUSE Linux and Zimbra combination will become a very good alternative to Windows Server running Exchange.
  3. Provide Application Tools:
    Novel has a large SUSE studio for developing wide variety of tools and applications. So, VMware can get advantage of this and can inject virtualisation into all the software appliances.
  4. Gaining ISVs:
    Novel has gained very good ISV momentum in the market with SUSE Linux.
    So, with good management VMware can take advantage of it and can compete with close-source application providers like Oracle and Microsoft.
  5. Data center Advantage:
    Microsoft and Novell have spent some years together for integrating Windows Server and Novel SUSE Linux OS for the data-center. So, now VMware can gain that joint customer list.

So VMware can get lots of advantages from Novel’s Intelligent Workload Management strategy and workload IQ. Other than SUSE Linux, VMware will have virtualization software, vSpehere Cloud operating system, collaboration and email platform named as Zimbra and SpringSource Development of Novell.