update: Novell will continue its march against Microsoft and any uptake of Vista despite a recent alliance with the software giant.

“We’re excited by the muted reaction to Vista,” Ron Hovsepian, Novell president and CEO, told the media at a breakfast meeting in Sydney today.

“We’re going to attack [Microsoft] vigorously and go after their footprint as much as we can,” Hovsepian said.

Vista was five years in the making, so the code behind it is very complex, according to Hovsepian. Whereas open source is more nimble and flexible. “And we have got to take advantage of that.”

Despite its commitment to attack the market on its own terms, Hovsepian admits there are benefits to its alliance with the software giant.

The reality is you can’t escape the “Microsoft juggernaut” in the marketplace, so you have to work with them to get your foot in the door, according to Hovsepian. When you talk to customers, he said, most will say “I hate Microsoft”. Yet those same customers say 60 percent of their servers run on Windows.

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