Microsoft and independent business unit of The Attachmate Group, SUSE, have announced a four-year extension of the agreement struck nearly five years ago between Microsoft and Novell,  for broad collaboration on Windows and Linux interoperability and support. Novell is part of The Attachmate Group following its acquisition of the intelligent workload management company  back in April.

This relationship will now extend until 1 January 2016, with Microsoft committed to invest $100 million in new SUSE Linux Enterprise certificates for customers receiving Linux support from SUSE.

Customer Momentum

According to Microsoft, IT operating environments have become increasingly consumerised, cloud-based and automated. This has resulted in an implicit expectation that the underlying technologies from multiple vendors should cooperate.

The joint Microsoft-SUSE collaboration has served over 725 global customers across a range of industries, including manufacturing, oil and gas, healthcare, as well as financial services. Due to this alliance, SUSE enables clients to consolidate their Linux support, by offering subscription support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and community Linux distributions the likes of CentOS.

Microsoft and SUSE will continue their technical collaboration on solutions which will assist  customers work more efficiently in the areas of cloud, virtualisation and manageability. An example of this is the combination of a cross-platform solution with Microsoft Hyper-V Cloud and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

This combination provides IT managers with a robust solution to migrate to a private cloud architecture. The companies also plan to extend Microsoft System Center through integration with SUSE Manager and select technologies to enhance Linux deployment, patching and updating.

“Our collaboration with SUSE not only helps customers to achieve success today, but also seeks to provide them with a solid foundation for tomorrow,” said Sandy Gupta, general manager of the Open Solutions Group at Microsoft. “Through our continued engagement on the technical side, an outstanding support offering from SUSE and our ability to provide mutual IP assurance, we feel confident that we will be able to deliver core value to those running mixed-source IT environments well into the future — and into the cloud.”

“We’re pleased to extend our long-term relationship with Microsoft,” said Michael Miller, vice president, global alliances and marketing for SUSE.

“Our mutual commitment to help organizations make the most of mixed Linux and Windows Server environments is what has made this collaboration successful. We will continue to work with Microsoft to deliver solutions that enable our joint customers to manage critical workloads in mixed-source environments across a wide range of computing models, including private, hybrid and full-cloud implementations.”

In related news Microsoft also recently revealed that it has sold its 400 millionth licence for the Windows 7 OS in less than two years.