We felt our customers wanted more support in the areas that make them the most money: networking, servers, storage, software.

We are pleased our partnership with Novell now extends to the support of Novell's powerful and popular GroupWise software. This is a great example of how our two companies are jointly advancing the capabilities of Linux across the enterprise.

We ran into 20 different support contracts for a single vendor. We weren't getting economies of scale, and software licenses were very difficult to manage.

In the old days most software manufacturers provided free support for their programs--it used to be possible to call the WordPerfect Corporation on an 800 number to get free help. Nowadays, you have to have a credit card handy to get help.

SUSE Linux users, who number in the millions worldwide, continue to show their support by installing the software in great numbers and seeking more opportunities to collaborate with Novell.

We have developed special software and applications to support Chinese users but we won't launch specifically designed products for mainland users.