A pair of Novell executives Wednesday touted the company's recent financial performance, but questions during the press conference at Cebit in Hanover, Germany, focused more on Microsoft's recent, high-profile pledge to improve interoperability and shore up its relationship with the open-source community.

Microsoft and Novell entered into a wide-ranging partnership in late 2006, which has seen the companies collaborate on interoperability and sales support for customers who want to run both Windows and Novell's SUSE Linux. In addition, Novell and Microsoft began a cooperative research effort around virtualization, physical and virtual server management, and translators for interoperability between the Open Document Format (ODF) and Microsoft's Open Office XML (OOXML) specification. Microsoft is attempting to get OOXML recognized as a standard.

"That's always difficult to speak on behalf of a partner," said Volker Smid, president and general manager of Novell EMEA. "With Microsoft, interoperability is not limited to the Novell partnership. The infrastructure our joint customers have built is more than just one platform. ...What Microsoft has done is an extension of what they've done with Novell."