Wal-Mart Cops to Buying SUSE Linux from Microsoft

Published: January 31, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Commercial Linux distributor Novell said last week that retailing giant Wal-Mart is among the first customers to take advantage of the reseller arrangement that Microsoft set up for SUSE Linux last November.

The two companies said that Wal-Mart is buying SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 to deploy in its data centers and will use the certificates that Microsoft bought in bulk to provide to its Windows customers who also want to support Linux. Wal-Mart was not specific about how it would use SLES 10, but did say that it would be plugging Linux into its Windows network, which is managed by Microsoft Operations Manager, Systems Management Server, and Active Directory. There is apparently going to be some effort to virtualize Windows and Linux on server platforms, too. Wal-Mart did not say how many licenses it would activate.

Under the arrangement between Microsoft and Novell, Microsoft paid $240 million to be able to distribute 70,000 SUSE Linux licenses a year for the next five years. So far, 35,000 of the initial installment of Linux licenses given to Microsoft have been activated. Microsoft may turn out to be a much better seller of Linux than Novell itself at this rate.

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