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In January, Chicago native Katie McAuliff, who has worked for Novell Inc. for 13 years, took over as president of Novell Canada, replacing Don Chapman. Ms McAuliff will oversee all facets of the Canadian organization including sales, marketing, consulting, support, training, finance and operations, with a focus on expanding and strengthening Novell Canada's partnership model.

She sat down with Jack Kapica of Globetechnology.com to explain her company and its plans.

JACK KAPICA: Novell has been shifting its image recently. What markets is the company focussing on?

KATIE McAULIFF: A lot of people don't really know who we are and what we do today. We're in five markets — data centre, desktop, security and identity management, resource management and workgroups. Novell is firmly behind all these markets.

The Linux desktop is a complete blast. This market just went to a million downloads. It's hot, it's cool, it's a lot less expensive, the kids are loving it. School systems have some great desktop operating systems — it's also in kiosks, retail systems, point-of-sale systems. A lot of those systems are being refreshed now, so the best thing now is really lowering the cost of ownership, increasing return on investment. This is a great space, very strong selling. We're 95 per cent there as a viable alternative to anything else.

These are huge growth markets for us, enjoying double-digit growth.

A lot of people don't even realize that Linux runs on a mainframe, and that we do a lot of business on mainframes with Linux partitions. My sense here is that the potential has not yet been realized in the Canadian market.

JACK KAPICA: When Novell bought SUSE Linux, I figured you'd do with it what IBM did with Linux — aim at the enterprise market, which is what Novell was all about before. Yet you've been making SUSE more appealing to ordinary users, with its eye candy its plug-and-play features. What is the strategy behind of appealing to both markets?

KATIE McAULIFF: Think about the enterprise applicability of an inexpensive desktop — think about how much money organizations spend on their desktop software and operating systems. If they could go from $3-million to $100,000 a year, what could they do with the $2.9-million?

If you're a health-care organization, you can use the money to tie together those back-end applications to improve health care and reduce patient mortality. So it really is an enterprise way.

We will say we are not in the consumer market. There's a lot of consumer Linux distributions out there that want everybody to buy them for their houses, but we are spilling into that market simply because of the strength of the product.

It's been quite a bit of fun. The kids take a look a the technology and say it's awesome.

JACK KAPICA: When kids get hold of an operating system and start playing with it, it takes off. Microsoft exploited that, but then Microsoft has been moving away from that strategy. I thought this would be a great opportunity for Novell, to make it possible for the kids to develop applications.

KATIE McAULIFF: For the open-source community, with the desktop, everything's open source, everything's available for them to go to play, to create. The open source community has had a tremendous impact on how you develop software today. Wouldn't you want to take advantage of the hundreds of thousands of people out there looking at the code, playing with the code, so you can get to the much greater outcome? It's the diversity of input, thoughts and ideas that you could never build inside commercial software development houses today.

So absolutely, they kids can play, they can create, and many of them are in this space today. It's appealing to them because of their peers, so I'm going to do this, I'm going to put it up and some other people are going to take a look at it.

It's a totally different model.

JACK KAPICA: Does the emerging popularity of Linux have anything to do with the softer market for computers, meaning companies would like to have the same power as other servers, but on machines that will last a long time?

KATIE McAULIFF: I don't know if I have an answer for that. I think it's more appealing to a kid to spend $50 versus $200 out of their own pocket on an operating system and on an office productivity suite.

JACK KAPICA: Dell's decided today that it would "certify" SUSE. What does that mean?

KATIE McAULIFF: Well, that's not official. What Dell has seen is a large increase in requests from organizations asking if their machines would run Linux, so it's just another signpost of acceptance of the market for Linux.

I always tell people that there are a lot of companies in this open-source space — IBM is in it in a very major way, HP is in it, Dell is in it — Dell resells Novell's Linux ZEN management services, so this is another step in market acceptance.

JACK KAPICA: Will it be a first step toward bundling SUSE with Dell computers?

KATIE McAULIFF: You know, Dell waits until the market gets made, and then they make some decisions, and this is a great indicator.

JACK KAPICA: Most people have misunderstood the deal you made with Microsoft, which they see as a deal with the devil. As I understand it, it's only about recognizing each other's virtualization technologies. Can you explain it?

KATIE McAULIFF: The bottom line is that the deal was for our customers. People can believe that or not believe that. And if I'm an organization, commercial, public, government and running these complex computer environments and I have a need to mix companies' technologies together, then we could say, Okay, Mr. Customer, don't worry about mixing our technologies with Microsoft's, we'll take care of all the interoperability, all the security, we're good to go and don't worry about it.

You can look at Deutsche Bank and AIG and Wal-Mart and all these companies and they all said yes, we've signed up for the same thing and it's great, publicly talking about it, it's for them.

Everyone's entitled to think what they want to think, but I can tell you flat out that that the reaction from a lot of customers in Canada has been very positive. So it's excellent for us.

JACK KAPICA: How about that part of the deal which says you won't sue each other over alleged patent infringements?

KATIE McAULIFF: It's also a good thing. You know because of all the confusion about intellectual property, it's just a good thing that admits there's been some history in the last few years in this exact area, and that had a CXO saying, you know, maybe I shouldn't be using this technology because I'm hearing this, and I'm hearing that.

And not just Linux, I'm talking about the industry in general, from IT guys and webmasters, IP rights here and IP rights there, and who's suing whom over patents.

So even if you think there's the slightest bit of a possibility this might prevent you from implementing this technology, it's gone. Companies care about those things. You take it off the table, then you can implement your technology.