Regarding the financial terms of the agreement, Hovsepian said The US$240 million it received from Microsoft would have been a failure if no customers were won as a result.

"We are getting a lot of redemption of the certificates with new customers," he said. They have dedicated sales and marketing dollars to agreement, and we are building out the lab together."

While Novell's financial statements may not have been the best is recent times, Hovsepian is confident the company's US$1.2 billion net cash position and rise in Linux support contracts paint a rosy future.

The company's chief marketing officer, John Dragoon, backed Hovsepian on the idea of removing uncertainty over the suitability of Linux.

"It is not an admission of IP infringement for either operating system," he said. "When we were competing on deals IP concerns were part of the gaining factor to considering Linux in enterprise and we wanted to remove that barrier whether it was there or not. We were losing deals and Linux at large was losing deals."