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Executive briefings with QANTAS, St. George Bank and a number of other large Australian companies reveals that 2006 will be prime time for Linux on the desktop within enterprises. This is the belief expressed by Novell's chief marketing officer, John Dragoon, on his recent visit to Australia for the LinuxWorld conference.

According to Dragoon, Novell can "move the needle" in the desktop marketplace this year selling its latest Linux distribution, Suse Linux 10 Enterprise Desktop at US$50 a copy. The question is can Novell make any serious money selling Linux distributions at that price?

"I guess we'll have to rely on volume," says Dragoon with a wry smile. "By definition the revenue is upgrade retention and services support but even at $50 a pop, given the potential volumes in emerging markets and verticals, we're a billion dollar company and we think we can move the needle quite a bit for broad-based desktop adoption. In addition, we provide the server side identity products and resource management products so our aim is to provide a more holistic set of infrastructure solutions around which Linux is the platform, whether it's server, desktop or both."

According to Dragoon, the release of Suse Linux 10 is the first serious attempt to address the interoperability issues and lack of driver support that has been a feature of previous Linux desktop distributions. He also believes that the independent hardware and software vendors will come under increasing pressure from emerging markets to provide support for the Linux platform.

"If you want to participate in emerging geographies like Brazil, Russia, India, China, government verticals and education verticals, you better have certification for Linux. The market will tend to drive the focus of the independent vendors," says Dragoon.

"On the driver issue, it's a bit of a Catch 22 where independent hardware vendors and software vendors won't certify on a platform until they see that the platform is going to have some pervasiveness in the marketplace. We have to convince them that Linux is a legitimate alternative to Microsoft and if they want to participate in its market growth then they have to be certified. In Novell's case, we spend a lot of time to make sure we have the infrastructure to allow the independent software and hardware vendors to certify on the platform."

With the release of Suse Linux 10, Novell has found itself in the interesting but precarious position of leading the charge in the open source desktop space against Microsoft. Red Hat appears to have dropped the ball in the desktop space, focussing instead on the safer and more immediate returns in the server area. Dragoon believes this has given Novell a clear differential advantage over its fellow Linux vendor.

"A clear differentiator is the ecosystem," says Dragoon. "Novell is a vertically integrated Linux and open source solution provider from the desktop to the data centre. Red Hat does not have a competitive offering on one code base for the desktop. They have a server side solution but they don't have (something like) Suse Linux Enterprise 10 for the desktop. If you're an enterprise that wants a common code base and therefore a common set of skills throughout your enterprise, we think we offer a differential advantage."....more