blog If you’re after a good belly laugh, I recommend you check out CIO Magazine’s interview here with the Australian sales director for Novell’s SuSe Linux distribution. As far as we’re concerned, SuSe is dying a rapid death right now (much like Lotus Notes). But Novell’s Hamish Miles is bullish about its prospects locally. Some amusing paragraphs:
“Some of our key milestones in the past have included in working in partnership with IBM on Linux distribution for the mainframe in 2000. We’re [also] one of the biggest players working on getting Linux into the Cloud … We have the best product, and when I go to meetings, our clients don’t tell us that our product is rubbish.”
Yup. I bet they don’t. But then, how many meetings would you get as the sales director for SuSe, in 2011? Of course, I’m prepared to be proved wrong. If there are serious SuSe installations out there Down Under (on the server or desktop), drop us a line anonymously or post in the comments below.
Image credit: Francisco Rojas, Creative Commons
> If there are serious SuSe installations out there Down Under
Crickets….chirp chirp
OS/2 was always better Windows, but if you don’t market and promote it right, and keep it relative in the marketplace, who cares
Don’t be too quick to judge.
Novell Cloud Services does run on SuSe, and it’s not a *BAD* product.
Size of install base? Not so much.
I just did a check. We have 19 servers running SuSe out of 2250
0.84% FTW!
Might not be big in Australia or the US, but it is big in Europe. I have just gone back to SuSE from Ubuntu and Slackware. OpenBSD is my choice for firewalls and routers, apparently it is dying big time too.
As a former user, and advocate for dumping SuSE, the biggest problem that I found was not enough people using it. This meant a smaller community to ask for help, as Novell’s support was sketchy at best.
I just received the following anonymous tip (modified slightly to protect the innocent):
“it’s the standard for all Linux servers in Telstra. There is still some Red Hat lurking about, but it’s mostly SuSE now and any new Linux systems need a damned good business justification for not using SuSE.”
Hmmm silver cloud? No lining for Suse there.
You need to check again…
https://cloud.telstra.com/virtual-servers
There is SUSE… And Ubuntu, Oracle Linux, Fedora, Debian CentOS and RedHat.
Thats their cloud offering mate, not what they run internally. Nice try.
My thoughts precisely. You beat me to it!
I don’t know how much SUSE is used in Australia, but overall worldwide it’s not dying a slow death at all. Just go to novell.com/success and you can get a list of “success stories” involving enterprise Linux. There are a few “small” companies in there, like the London Stock Exchange and Sony.
And for every success story (customer willing to be a reference) I’m sure there are plenty of additional organizations also using it. My current organization here in the US uses SLES on all Linux servers, but we’re not on the list of “success stories.”
In addition, Hamish’s point about IBM is a good one. IBM is still pushing mainframes today thanks to Linux, and I would suspect the majority of those deployments are SLES for System z.
You obviously do not know what you are talking about. Just about every major bank in South Africa is running SLES on mainframe or bare metal server or virtualised. The WHOLE of Africa (Nigeria, Tanzania, Kenya, Ghana to name a few) – banks, Government, Telco’s use SLES and some Red Hat.In South Africa our biggest mobile provider run a LOT of SLES. 70% of Government Department in South Africa run SLES. In Europe & Africa – BMW, Porsche, etc (I can go on and on). So what if a company only has 19 out of 2250 SLES servers? It is probably because you can do 1000 times more on one SLES server than one Microsoft Server. In China – most supercomputers run Linux and mostly SLES.
I think you’re a bit confused there, Australia != Africa. I know they both start with “A”, but they’re actually two different things.
No one is confused. Earlier in the blog, it is stated “As far as we’re concerned, SuSe is dying a rapid death right now.” The blog later ends asking for examples of SUSE’s use in Australia. I don’t know how many companies use SUSE Linux in Australia, but even if it’s not many, that definitely doesn’t mean SUSE is dying a rapid death. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Leandra’s examples about its use in Europe and Africa show this. Plus, again, as I already mentioned you can go to Novell’s site and get a list of companies who have vouched for being references.
I used to run my mid-sized company on 2 NetWare servers. Then I stupidly listened to a sales dork who kept pushing me to “upgrade” to Windows, which required 5 servers. After two years of patching, rebooting, and all the other BS that comes with Windows, I fired the sales dork and upgraded to SUSE. Now I’m back down to 2 servers, and saving all kinds of time and money.
BTW, all of my company’s laptops run SUSE Linux Desktop and we use virtualized Windows for the 1 or 2 apps that haven’t grown up and been ported to a real OS.
Many of the research-oriented clusters/supercomputers around Australia run SuSe: https://nf.nci.org.au/facilities/software/facilities_site.php?site=all
So, what evidence do you have that SuSe is “dying a slow death” or is comparable to Lotus Notes?
Very interesting; I didn’t know this. My basis for saying that SuSe is dying a slow death is that I never hear it mentioned whenever I talk to IT people about Linux servers etc; these days it always seems like it’s Red Hat or nothing. I haven’t come across a SuSe deployment for some time.
VMWare customers get an entitlement for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 for no additional charge.
So maybe you have missed references to SLES as being SuSe ?
Of course what you run really depends on what the business requirement > software stack requires.
Australia has always been a small market – but SuSe is definitely not dying globally.
SUSE is not Novell SUSE. Attachmate have SUSE and Novell as a separate companies. Of course for some markets the same Attachmate staff would be responsible for marketing of both companies products.
Cheers
Ian
Uneducated and naive understanding of what’s really happening in larger organisations. Suse is used to develop SAP and SAP flies on Suse in comparison to Windoze which is why most serious SAP houses use Suse in Australia. I believe statements like the above show the author really isn’t with what’s happening in the Australian IT industry. Sad :(
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