Novell is the number two distributor of the open source Linux operating system and a major distributor of enterprise infrastructure software and service, but has seen declining revenues for the past five years. The major reason for this is Microsoft's dominance in the enterprise software arena. The future may hold some bright spots for Novell, however. First, the company has partnered with historical competitor Microsoft to bundle its Linux product with the new Windows Vista. Perhaps most importantly, the fast growth of virtualization software may be a boon to all open source providers, including Novell. Virtualization technology allows enterprise companies to run multiple operating systems simultaneously--including Windows and Linux--on a single piece of hardware.

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