When Novell looked at various application servers, 'we chose JBoss ahead of Red Hat's own Jonas,' says Hovsepian.

Novell still has a satisfactory contract in place with JBoss in its new guise, despite its favoring of the Suse distribution of Linux.

Some industry commentators have suggested that the Red Hat move will encourage IBM Corp. to seek a closer relationship with Novell on the open source front.

Hovsepian visited New Zealand for the first time last week to talk about the local market growth he foresees and about Novell's approach to the Suse-based platform. The company claims to have a consistent code base from mainframe servers through to mid-range servers and down to the desktop. 'You, as Chief Information Officer, get to train your staff on one platform,' he says.

Novell announced Suse Linux Enterprise 10 at its Brainshare conference last month. Earlier the same month, at Cebit in Hanover, it announced its Enterprise Linux Desktop.