HSBC to Standardize on Novell’s SUSE Linux

HSBC, the British-based banking and financial services group that has more than 125 million customers globally, is moving to standardize on a single Linux distribution: Novell’s SUSE Linux.

The HSBC move is a direct result of the technical cooperation agreement penned between Microsoft and Novell in November 2006. As part of the agreement, the two companies committed to make their products work better together, to jointly build, market and support new solutions to improve interoperability, and to deliver new virtualization capabilities.

Susan Heystee, Novell’s vice president and general manager for global strategic alliances, told eWEEK that there had been a lot of progress between the two companies over the last four months on the technical collaboration front.

“These developments have been shared with global customers like HSBC, who also provided input into the process around interoperability and into helping Microsoft and Novell understand those areas that are key for the bank in this regard,” she said.

Click here to read more about how Microsoft and Novell made peace over Linux.

Microsoft will now give HSBC certificates for three-year priority support subscriptionsto SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell, as the bank moves to standardize on SUSE Linux.

HSBC, which has 9,500 offices with 284,000 employees in 76 countries, believes that the move will reduce its total cost of ownership for Linux, and improve interoperability with its existing Microsoft Windows infrastructure.

Read the full story on eWeek.com: HSBC to Standardize on Novell’s SUSE Linux