Microsoft announced on Tuesday a program that will pay some transition costs for companies that want to move from Novell's NetWare operating system onto servers running Windows.
The software titan said it will offer up to $600 per server in professional-services credit to companies that agree to make the switch, up to a maximum of $15,000. In order to get the subsidy for third-party services, NetWare users have to switch to Windows and buy at least 50 client-access licenses per server. Microsoft sees the uncertainty surrounding NetWare's future as an opportunity to win more customers over to Windows Server 2003. Some Novell customers are concerned that the company's focus on Linux could result in the abandonment of NetWare.
The Microsoft program partly grew out of a discussion that Martin Taylor, the software behemoth's platform strategy general manager, had with Novell resellers at Microsoft's worldwide partner conference this summer in Toronto. The resellers said that Novell's forays into Linux are prompting even die-hard NetWare customers to consider a switch--either to Windows or Linux.
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