Novell looking for aggressive expansion of research

Bangalore, Feb 14 (UNI) Novell will take up an aggressive expansion plan of its India Development Centre here to significantly build upon its strength of 325, indicating the growing importance the company attached to its India operations.

Novell Executive Vice-President and Chief Technology Officer Jeffrey Jaffe told newspersons here today that the India Development Centre was the second largest research centre for the company after the one in the US.

He said the India operations contributed to nearly 25 per cent of the research activity of the company, up from 13 per cent a decade ago. ''We are here on a long term basis,'' he added, but declined to give a specific number of new additions. However, a senior Indian official of the company indicated that the expansion would be a significant one.

Commenting on the technical collaboration with Microsoft on drawing up a joint technical road map on virtualisation, Dr Jaffe said the two companies were engaged in joint developoment of technologies such as virtualisation, web services for managing physical and virtual servers, directory and identify interoperability and document format compatibility.

He said that over the next five years, Microsoft had assured a revenue of 260 million Dollars due to the collaborative efforts.

Dr Jaffe said the components of virtualisation offering for Linux and Windows would be released during the year. The technology developed by the two companies would allow customers to host Suse Linux Enterprise server 10 from Novell as a virtualised guest on any upcoming service pack of Microsoft virtual server and host Windows server Longhorn as a paravirtualised guest on Suse Linux enterprise server 10 using the xen virtualisation technology embedded in the Linux operating system.

He said the technology could enable the task carried out by multiple servers to be offered through a single server, thereby saving on cost of servers and effectively utilising its manpower.

UNI