The Hindu Business Line : Novell bets big on Bangalore centre for R&D

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Bangalore Feb 14 The Bangalore development centre of Linux firm Novell will help make the Microsoft-Novell blend of enterprise products for the world, said its Chief Technology Officer, Mr Jeffery Jaffe, on Wednesday.

The centre is the largest for the firm outside the US and employs 275 engineers.

These engineers will be developing products for enterprise customers in the areas of virtualisation, Web services for managing physical and virtual servers, directory and identity interoperability, and document format compatibility.

In November last, the two companies surprised the world with an announcement to work together for the next five years.

They will jointly build, market and support new solutions that will address significant problems faced by enterprise customers.

According to Mr Jaffe, the majority of customers of the two firms have mixed-source environments and they want their platform vendors to take responsibility for making things work with each other (interoperability).

As part of the five-year agreement, Microsoft can use, resell or distribute certificates that customers redeem to receive SUSE Linux Enterprise Server subscriptions for upgrades, updates and technical support from Novell.

Microsoft will market $240 million worth of Novell's products, such as the SUSE Linux enterprise server, in the next five years globally, said Mr Jaffe.

The Bangalore IDC will see a significant ramp-up in employee numbers soon.

"The technical talent in Bangalore is very great and phenomenal. We have very specific growth plans for Bangalore. We have an aggressive hiring programme," Mr Jaffe said, adding that 20-30 per cent of the global R&D is from India.

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