Sleeping with the enemy: Novell and Microsoft

The joint efforts of Microsoft and Novell to provide NDS support for NT, Active directory and Windows 2000 will save money for businesses, according to Gary Hein, chief strategist at Novell.

In a video interview with Silicon.com, Hein said collaborating with the enemy will create a more heterogeneous environment for the enterprise. "Active directory is important to Microsoft because they have been lacking in the directory space for many years and this has typically increased the management cost of NT servers. So Active directory is very much a Microsoft-specific product for managing NT server and specifically Exchange.

"But customer are interested in integrating it into a larger environment that may include Solaris, mainframes and applications like Lotus Notes - non-Microsoft technologies. That is where we see a very fitting integration between our directory and, of course, Active directory," Hein explained.

In most enterprises today Hein believes around 80 per cent of applications can have a single sign on. It can cover Web servers, firewalls, dial in access, NT servers, Unix platform and applications on those platforms. But Hein said aiming for 100 per cent is not realistic.

"Because the legacy systems that are out there it may never reach 100 per cent but of course every quarter we are releasing more products and more technologies and creating more partners to integrate more and more of the enterprise into a directory enabled solution," he said.

The full interview with Gary Hein is available in our Client/Server Channel (http://www.silicon.com/a34587 ).