Dueling Interop Labs: Microsoft Opens One with Novell, Another with Sun

Yesterday, Microsoft and Novell announced they were moving in together - at least insofar as their joint development work was concerned, into a modest 2,500 square-foot laboratory in Cambridge, Mass. "The first priority for the lab team will be to ensure interoperability between Microsoft and Novell virtualization technologies," reads yesterday's statement from Microsoft.

Then comes today, with Microsoft making nice with its friends at Sun Microsystems. They too will open up an interop laboratory...or so they said during a press conference this afternoon. However, reporters who were already familiar with the Novell development yesterday wondered, where will this Sun lab be located? Will it be in Cambridge? Will it be bigger or smaller? And perhaps most importantly, why isn't there just one lab?

"There are different locations," responded Microsoft corporate vice president Andrew Lees, acknowledging the Novell lab in Cambridge will be working on a fairly separate track. Then realizing that Microsoft had already said the Cambridge lab would be devoted to virtualization, and the Sun lab would be devoted to virtualization...Lees tried to find a way to, shall we say, interoperate the two methodologies without contradicting himself...too much.

"Some of the technologies may end up being common, like virtualization - a fairly cross-cutting piece of technology," added Lees. "This agreement that we're talking about today includes the interoperability and the virtualization, but really also perhaps the biggest part of it in many respects is the collaboration we're doing as part of the OEM agreement for Windows Server."

Last June, Microsoft appointed Tom Hanrahan of its existing Open Source Software Lab to run the Novell effort. Yesterday for his Port 25 blog, Hanrahan wrote, "Those of us who work at the lab have strived over the past few months to create an environment that is not strictly Microsoft and not strictly Novell. We've successfully created a unique entity, a development lab, at which there resides a single team of engineers whose individuals are involved in and supportive of each others' work."

But while Microsoft's efforts with Novell and Microsoft's efforts with Sun may not necessarily be one party's or the other's exclusively, Lees made clear today the two efforts are not mutual, particularly because one deals with SUSE Enterprise Linux and the other with Solaris. They are thus two very different tracks. His implication was that across-the-board interoperability is a purely Microsoft-oriented goal, thus any lab that would push Windows interoperability as its main objective would be more Microsoft-centered than it should actually be.

"The number of people [in the Sun lab] will increase and decrease depending on exactly what projects we have," Lees stated today in response to a question from a Gartner analyst. "We have a minimum staff, and that will probably increase over time. We'll have a lab here directly in Redmond on Microsoft's premises that will have some hardware on it and some engineers; and depending on what we're working on, which customer situations, exactly what level of testing, we expect different people will use that. It becomes a resource and a focal point for how the companies can work together effectively to solve those customers' problems."

Lees declined to answer whether a similar site would be opened on Sun's premises, though Sun Executive Vice President John Fowler added that his company would also contribute to solving interop problems at the customer level by installing Windows on servers in its own customer centers.