Novell needs a recount of its certified applications as Red Hat still leads in certified applications

Tuesday, November 25, 2008, 11:18
Internet
41 views
View Comments

Novell’s Linux business is doing very good these days. On Monday, Novell announced that it is leading in certified application vis-à-vis Red Hat, with more than 2500 applications. The news seems to be great but Red Hat made an announcement in October 2007 that it has crossed 3000 certified applications. According to Red Hat PR representative, Red Hat has more than 3400 certified applications.

There are 4314 certified applications listed in Red Hat’s independent software vendors catalog. It means that Red Hat has 1765 more certified applications that Novell which is quite a big difference. It is quite clear that Red Hat is still the leader in certified Linux applications, not Novell.

According to Justin Steinman, vice president of Solution and Product Marketing for Novell, “Based on publicly available information, SUSE Linux Enterprise 9 and 10 have the most certified software applications when compared to the latest releases of all other commercial Linux distributions.”

When the latest editions of SUSE Linux Enterprise are compared to latest editions of all other commercial Linux distros, the Novell comes out on the top. The recent editions include the last two commercial releases of any Linux distribution which are RHEL 4/5 and SLES 9/10. There are 2509 certified applications listed on SUSE Linux Software catalog.

According to Red Hat, “Of course, counting how many applications are certified turns out to be more complicated than you might imagine. And maybe it doesn’t even matter because, where applications are concerned, there’s a classic 80:20 rule in play. In other words 80 percent of customers use the same 20 percent of applications. Provided the 15 applications you need are available the fact that there are several thousand to choose from doesn’t really matter. Nevertheless, it’s fun to count. Fun, yes, and useful to a point, but the real value of a Linux distribution goes far beyond the number of certified applications it claims. We passed the point a long time ago when the leading Linux distributions achieved critical mass with applications. It’s hard to even imagine most (server) software vendors coming out with an application that doesn’t run on Linux.”