Recent announcement of Microsoft and Novell pact covers the following grounds:

• Support in virtualization of each other OS to coexist on same hardware.
• Patent covenant so that buyers do not have to worry about patent infringement and related legal issues.
• Better working together of MS Office and Openoffice suites.

These will be beneficial to customers for the following reasons.

• Many buyers including government run and want to interoperate both types of systems. Knowing that Windows and SUSE Linux can coexist (including office applications), will make the decision process easier. Patent covenant is a step in the same direction so the headache of worrying about patent legal issues is taken away from buyer.
• Customers stand to save on server and hardware costs due to virtualization support

In a nutshell, this alliance will benefit Microsoft to get better results among government buyers, who are more concerned about interoperability as well as cost and choice of platform/OS. Novell would benefit in its customer base using Novell Netware and other products, who want to interoperate better with Windows. Even though SUSE Linux is one of the dominant flavours of Linux, it does not get much revenues from Linux business, and thus has lot of catching up to do with leader RedHat.