Novell's local operation is taking a leading role in an ambitious
year-long plan to move all the company's 6000 worldwide staff onto Linux
desktops.
The migration, which will see staff across the globe using SuSE Linux
systems running OpenOffice, is partly motivated by broader commercial
concerns. Novell completed its $US210 million acquisition of SuSE in
January this year, and the company wants to use itself as a showcase for
both SuSE and Ximian, which it also purchased last year.
However, Novell Asia Pacific CIO Sam Gennaoui said that there was also a
basic financial argument for the shift. "We are like any other company;
we still have ROIs to deliver," he said.
Around 90 per cent all of the company's 350 Asia-Pacific staff, half of
whom are based in Australia, have started using OpenOffice as a
replacement for Microsoft's Office suite.
Reaction so far has been positive. "There always tends to be some
pushback from users, but there's a sense of willingness to embrace the
new technology," Gennaoui said. The local operation is "way ahead of the
movement" in the rest of Novell, he added. "We have a smaller base of
users and we're more flexible."
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