HP to Lead With Novell's SuSE Linux on Desktops, Servers

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

At Novell's annual BrainShare conference last week, the company announced an expanded partnership with Hewlett-Packard whereby HP will lead with Novell's newly acquired SuSE commercial Linux distribution, as much as possible, on everything from laptops to high-end servers. The caveat "as much as possible" is only limited to the speed at which languages and applications are supported in SuSE by Novell.

While the HP and Novell press releases did not say this explicitly, Ephraim Rivera, worldwide director of Linux marketing at HP, did in an interview describing the deal. The expanded relationship that Novell and HP announced this week builds on evolving relationships that HP has forged with both SuSE and Red Hat in the past year. Rivera was careful to add that leading with SuSE does not mean not supporting Red Hat, Turbolinux, Mandrake, Red Flag, or other Linux distributions as local conditions and specific customers require. It just means that both HP and Novell are going to push each other's products together as much as is practical.

The new part of the announcement this week from the two companies is that HP will now be supporting SuSE Professional on PCs. Rivera could not say which laptops, desktops, and workstations would be supported with SuSE's Linux, but he did say that the two companies were working out the specifics of how Linux would be delivered on machines and that they would have all the issues ironed out by the second half of 2004. He said further that HP would only be supporting the SuSE Professional edition, which can run in both 32-bit and 64-bit modes on Pentium, Xeon, Opteron, and Itanium processors. He said that the two would ship the most current version of SuSE Linux for such machines available on the market, which implies that it will be the new SuSE 9.1 Professional, which was just announced this week and which will start shipping in May. SuSE 9.1, which also comes in a low-cost personal edition for 32-bit Pentium machines, is not going to be supported at this time because HP is only making moves in the enterprise desktop space. Remember, this is the same HP whose chairman two years ago at LinuxWorld chastised the Linux community for having aspirations on the desktop. But Rivera said that some customers are tinkering with Linux on their desktops or tire-kicking the idea, and they want the same version of Linux and the same support structure for their desktop Linux as they can get for their servers.

The new enterprise desktop support that is coming in 2H 2004 from HP and Novell supplements HP's support for SuSE 8.1 Standard Edition and SuSE 8.1 Linux Enterprise Server on recent Pentium 4 Xeon-based ProLiant (G3 and G4 machines) and Itanium-based Integrity servers. Under that June 2003 agreement, HP was allowed to pre-install SuSE Linux on the servers, with the servers and software being backed by HP's own Level 1 and Level 2 technical support services. This deal was inked for worldwide distribution, and SuSE's own engineering and product maintenance teams will back up HP's tech support people, and if a situation escalates to Level 3, SuSE's engineers will get on the call with HP's technicians to resolve the problem, all seamlessly, all with one point of contact.

As for how HP will deliver SuSE Professional on desktops, Rivera was vague, saying only that the two companies were weighing the options, which include pre-installing it on select machines, putting a SuSE license and CD in the box, giving enterprises Novell site licenses, or more sophisticated managed services contracts. Enterprise customers tend to have their own operating system and application stacks on their desktops, laptops, and workstations, so not preloading a raw SuSE instance on all machines is not necessarily a bad thing.

Because Red Hat has effectively abandoned the desktop to the open source community through the Fedora project, there is no way that HP can credibly push Fedora as an alternative to SuSE Professional on business desktops. However, HP has a longer-standing relationship with Red Hat on servers and workstations, and Red Hat is very much keen on pushing its Enterprise Linux WS 3.0 for workstations into commercial accounts. You can bet HP will be happy to continue to sell and support this software. And HP is not pulling the plug on supporting Mandrake's Linux distribution on selected PCs, which the company has been offering since last July. Mandrake's desktop Linux is well-respected, and in certain markets--particularly in its French home stomping ground--it will be the preferred Linux regardless of the SuSE deal.

HP will roll out SuSE on its business PCs starting in North America, to be followed by Europe, then Asia/Pacific and Latin America. The exact schedule is yet to be determined, Rivera said.

The question now is when HP will bit the bullet and install SuSE 9.1 Personal on any commercial or consumer desktop. It is a fair guess that this will depend on how well or poorly Linux does in the enterprise on desktops. But don't be surprised if Linux takes off on even consumer desktops in Asia, Eastern Europe, China, and other emerging markets a lot faster than it has in the industrialized world. Linux could turn out to be to Windows what the cell phone is to the land line. If you don't have any existing software infrastructure, why wouldn't you pick Linux if all you want to do is get on the Internet?