Despite building up a strong partnership with Linux vendor Red Hat, Oracle has announced its intention to facilitate a similar partnership with SuSE Linux’s new owner Novell.

Oracle president Charles Phillips said Novell contacted him a few weeks ago to discuss plans to move ahead with the deal.

Speaking at the company's annual end user conference OracleWorld in Melbourne this week, Phillips said the company has always been close to Red Hat but needs another flavour.

Novell, he said, has a "decent sized" customer base so "we are going to meet shortly to talk".

Phillips said Novell will receive the same level of support provided to Red Hat, adding that it is certainly in Oracle's interest to pursue the partnership.

Phillips did not offer a timeframe for a revamped Oracle-Novell Linux partnership, saying, “we’re going to get around to doing that”.

Novell’s Asia-Pacific president, Rhonda O'Donnell, said the two companies have a good relationship which is growing.

“Oracle is committed to certifying all products on SuSE and will be involved in our upcoming launch of SLES9 [SuSE Linux Enterprise Server],” O’Donnell said. “Oracle has a new full-time alliance exec assigned to work with Novell [which] has assigned a new global director and geo partnership managers for the Oracle relationship."

O’Donnell said SuSE Linux enterprise server is a “technically more advanced distribution” than Red Hat, and “Novell also offers a host of other services that Red Hat can't match”.

“Novell also has a large partner ecosystem that customers of Novell and Oracle can draw on for additional value-added services,” she said. “Having partners like Oracle run their solutions on Novell's Linux platform is great validation of Novell's strategy.”

Red Hat’s Asia-Pacific vice president Gus Robertson is not concerned about the impact a renewed Oracle-Novell partnership may have on its business.

“We’re not focusing on other Linux distributions but rather Unix migrations,” Robertson said. “Red Hat has 90 percent of the enterprise Linux market and is happy to see another player in the market to promote Linux.”