Swiss Government Picks SUSE for 3,000+ Servers

Published: January 10, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Novell, eager to demonstrate that it has lots of momentum behind its Linux shipments and in particular among the European governments that have been eagerly adopting Linux and other open source technologies, has announced that the Swiss Federal Government has decided to deploy SUSE Linux Enterprise Server across more than 3,000 servers that support the government's various operations.

Jurg Roemer, delegate for information strategy at the Swiss Federal Government, said that while many departments in the Swiss government have deployed Linux-based solutions to run their applications, this is the first time that the Swiss government has instituted a formalized process for rolling out Linux and also the first time that it has chosen a specific commercial Linux implementation that departments can deploy. Novell said that it was a competitive bid, which would seem to indicate that other players--possibly Mandriva and Red Hat--were also competing for the contract. The financial terms of the deal were not divulged. The Swiss government did not say, by the way, that Linux would be the required platform going forward for all of its applications, but merely that for those who want Linux, they should use SUSE Linux.