The speaker – Malcolm Yates? – is a great presenter … he’s
quite an interactive and lively presenter … it’s apparent that he
enjoys his job. He joked about the acquisition and pondered what
you get when they combine? 😉

• Novell & SuSE
• No Se?
• No Use?

He progressed through the various versions of SuSE … Personal,
Desktop, Professional, Standard Server and Enterprise Server.
Professional is really the one that has everything for the “power”
user. Web interface for all administration and services.
You can also use YaST … written in NCurses. They also have Open
Exchange Server …

Enterprise Solutions … SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 … of SLES 8
… he then went through his “picture presentation” that
was great. What a kick … this is just getting better and
better. He was giving away prizes for the people who could figure
out what each picture represented …

He then went through the various customer/partners … Mobile, Ford,
Deutsche Bank (2000+ servers world wide), Catapillar, Safeway,
SmithBarney … 80%-90% of mainframes running Linux are running SuSE.

He then went through all of the certifications – Carrier Grade (Jun
2003), EAL 2+ (Aug 2003), EAL 3+ (Jan 2004) … most of these within
the last year in partnership with IBM. He indicated that this is
the fastest that anyone has ever got EAL 3+ certification after their
2+ certification.

“We do not sell software” … “We sell our experience, our support, our
ability to provide tested maintenance, our integration capability, our
development effort …”

Their process is:

• Open Source Community (~3000 packages) ->
• SuSE Common Code Base (Configuration and Test ~6000 packages) ->
• AutoBuild (Automated system identitifes incompatibilities) ->
• QA + Doc (Manual Regression, Automated Regression, Feature Test) ->
• Production

Their products have a 5-year life cycle. Releases of new version
every 18-24 months. So there is overlap between versions, and
customers understand the schedule and when they will have to
update/upgrade.  No questions and this obviously allows them to plan their revenue stream.

He listed all of the SuSE firsts … Enterprise Class Linux, 5 year
maintenance support, Linux for S/390 & zSeries, iSeries, 64bit on
all eServers, Global support contract with IBM, AMD Opteron support,
2.6 kernel features on a 2.4 kernel, Enterprise Desktop, EAL 3+
certified … and 1st class world class partner for business …

And some caveats about using Linux?   There are some obvious
ones that he won’t say … there are conflicting things … there are
some that he can not say.

It was an amusing presentation, and quite entertaining … he did a
great overview of the products  … however I am not really sure
that I learned anything about the “Partner Program” and what is it, or
what it has to offer.