Yup, I was there from 3-6 June earlier this month... due to my traveling schedule and procrastination, well... mostly procrastination, I end up posting this "me too" post 2 days before the end of June.
Anyway, I hereby present some SUSE highlights, photos and a video of the event from my perspective:
1) With our close collaboration with Intel on Moblin, we are 1 of 2 software vendors allowed to have a booth on the traditionally hardware vendor ONLY show floor.
2) On display are SUSE Studio (beta) and a whole string of Netbooks from Acer, MSI and ASUS loaded with openSUSE 11.1 with Moblin GUI. Really sweet!
3) I found some time to go up to the 83 or 85th floor on the famous Taipei 101... what a view of the city!
4) Finally, a picture of all the hardworking Novell folks (hackers, managers, sales, marketing) who pulled this first-of-its-kind presence at Computex. Also in the picture are attractive promoters and a dude who was in a Geeko suit.
Speaking of mascots, here is a video of a Computex mascot mixing it up with our SUSE Geeko... looks like we'll need to hire the guy (or gal) in the Computex mascot to our Geeko suit for next year... Enjoy!
I was at the Open Source Singapore Pacific-Asia Conference (OSSPAC) and had the privilege to share the Novell SUSE story at their keynote event yesterday (17th Feb 2009).
In the afternoon, while walking through the various vendor and partner exhibits, I came across these two fellas and just had to take a picture with them... from left to right: The Duke, MySQL Dolphin and me with SUSE Geeko in tow.
SUSE Linux Enterprise with JAVA and MySQL ... nice
Oh, and here are a short snippet on the contents of my keynote:
The Novell SUSE history and how SUSE is gaining more than 5000 new customers for Novell in 2007 alone... and growing revenue at 38% from 2006 to 2007 and from 2007 to 2008. We are growing SUSE at a higher rate than the Linux market at 22% year on year
All these are possible with the strong support from Novell partner ecosystem and it includes our strategic relationships with IBM, Microsoft, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Intel and AMD
SUSE is important but not the only open source story at Novell. I picked Mono/Moonlight and SUSE Studio as some of the projects that Novell is investing in and hoping to yield fruits down the line
Looks like I did not manage to write a single entry for the 2nd half of October and the whole of November.
Here's a quick recap of the stuff I've been up to:
HP-Intel EDA Seminar 2008 - It was a fruitful trip up to Penang. We were greatful for HP's invitation and we are happy to share the High-Performance Computing (HPC) capabilities and leading marketshare position with our target audience. Did you know that 6 out of the TOP 10 supercomputers in 2008 are using SUSE Linux Enterprise Server?
Links to the presentation and photos (Day 1, Day 2)
VMware Virtualization Forum 2008 - Showed off Platespin products with our Platespin colleagues and business parter at Singapore's Suntec City Convention Centre.
Dell APJ Enterprise Summit 2008 - Attended the one at Kuala Lumpur and it was a very fruitful trip. I had a good interactive time presenting the entire Novell Virtualization/Automation solution suite. The only challenging bit was to do this 1 hour session 6 times over 2 days. It was worth it though as the audience understood Novell's value proposition and how we can GTM very well together.
IBM NEDC Summit 2008 - Attended both the Kuala Lumpur and Singapore event. Spoke to IBMers and their customers on the value of SUSE Linux Enterprise and our ability to have a common code base across the commodity System x to the industry proven and very resilient System z (mainframe).
I've been working on a few projects with customers and partners... and hope to share what I've learnt on this blog later this month... and I can't wait for openSUSE 11.1 and the next big leap forward of SUSE Linux Enterprise 11.
Last Saturday (20 Sept) was Software Freedom Day 2008 worldwide. For Singapore, it was held at the Singapore Management University (SMU) School of Information Systems. The website for this event is at http://www.softwarefreedomday.sg
I had the privilege to present a topic at the Technology/Consumer Track. My topic titled "Road to Freedom: Practical Steps to Linux and Open Source Productivity". As this is a consumer track, I wanted to educate the public on the latest openSUSE 11 and how it can become a productive end-user desktop... using Windows analogies to bridge the gap in understanding Linux and Open Source tools.
Had a good time there. Looking forward to an even better one next year as the organizers are already enthusiastically talking of a bigger and more public venue.
I just have to blog about this one since its been reported virtually (pun intended) everywhere on the WWW.
It appears that Big Blue has announced a partnership with the top 3 Linux distributions (SUSE, Red Hat and Ubuntu) from Novell, Red Hat and Canonical to offer their customers a Windows-free desktop alternative.
In my opinion, this has more to do with marketing and awareness. IBM's embrace and support of Linux and open source, where it made sense for them and their customers, is well documented and goes back about 10 years now.
Check out this video demonstrating Lotus Notes 8 on SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 SP1 from a year back.
The real news is that IBM sees a window (pun intended) of opportunity where it can capitalize on the slow adoption of Vista. IBM demonstrates to the customers the functional parity between Windows and Linux desktops and introduces the math of Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). By helping their clients save on fundamentals of computing (ie OS cost), their clients will have more budget left over to spend of value added software (ie Lotus suite of collaboration software).
The most quoted success for IBM and Novell is Peugeot Citroën and 20,000 desktops moving to SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10. In the Asia Pacific region, we have seen successes in the SMB space with notably references like India's ELCOT and China Meteorological Administration, just to name a few.
So the real question is, will this work? It depends. We know there is potential in this value proposition but there is equally many probable customer scenarios from IT deployment, licensing cost structures to human buying behaviour (ie Toyota is more economical but I WANT a Hummer).
Like the authors from ZDNet who wrote this piece titled "IBM should spend another $1B to sell its Symphony OpenOffice-Linux desktop to the masses", the way to truly engage and win in the consumer desktop space as opposed to the server space, its all a matter of marketing to change user perception. One only needs to look at Apple for a good example. Show us the marketing dollars!!!
Another BIG step (if not LEAP) for Open Source... if you have not heard about Big Buck Bunny... I'm so delighted you get to hear it from my blog... much Thanks goes to Lai Kuan for spreading this wonderful news...
Big Buck Bunny is a 3D animation movie licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 . This means that the entire movie is FREE for you to Share, to Remix as long as you Attribute the original authors of the work. Also worthy of mention is the 3D content creation software behind the movie... Yes, its an open source software and its called Blender (http://www.blender.org).
For high resolution copies, go to the Download section on Big Buck Bunny site. I'm embedding the smaller YouTube movie below. Enjoy, oh yeah, its wickedly funny too.
So I went and "skinned" (I believe that's the correct term) my Lenovo Thinkpad T61p. Now I feel so special... hahaha... all for the sake of promoting SUSE Linux Enterprise!
It was worth it though as the audience understood Novell's value proposition and how we can GTM very well together. 
Methinks his newly skinned Thinkpad would look even better when placed
