The new licensing program is only available in Europe at this stage and is known as the Novell Strategic Enterprise Agreement for Linux, or SEAL. Waltham, Massachusetts-based Novell claims the bulk purchasing deal will provide customers with discounts of up to 50%, as well as added flexibility.
SEAL applies to mainframe customers making bulk purchases of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9, and enables them to deploy the software on any IBM eSeries server platform irrespective of its architecture or processor platform.
Customers are able to transfer their Linux workloads from one architecture to another without having to renegotiate licenses, as long as the total volume stays within the initial order amount. There is a sliding scale of long-term contract discounts, which increase with the number of Linux workloads.
The company said the program will enable customers to budget for migrations from Unix or Windows to SUSE Linux on IBM hardware, as well as enabling them to cope with changing application requirements.
