Some headliners were in new roles Monday at the opening of Novell Inc.'s BrainShare conference at the Salt Palace.

Ron Hovsepian was onstage in his first BrainShare foray as both president and chief executive officer, while Microsoft Corp. representatives played the role of Novell partner rather than villain.

As John Dragoon, Novell's senior vice president and chief marketing officer, observed as both Novell and Microsoft executives left the stage following an onstage chat, "Well, I guess pigs do fly."

The companies announced in early November that they would make their products work together. That kept Microsoft from being the target of potshots — as it was in previous BrainShare gatherings — and had representatives of both companies playing buddy-buddy Monday.

"At the end of the day, Microsoft will push for Windows and Novell will push for Linux ... but we will agree on getting interoperability between the platforms," said Jeff Jaffe, executive vice president and chief technology officer at Massachusetts-based Novell, which has about a third of its 4,700-person work force in Provo.

For his part, Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer, cited a need for "a much more natural operational co-existence."

Hovsepian, who took over the Novell CEO duties in June when the company ousted Jack Messman, described Novell as an "ecosystem" but said there are "going to be other ecosystems that you need to connect to, so there needs to be some interoperability between those ecosystems."

One is Microsoft, he said.

"I will tell you, as the CEO of this corporation, it was done for one reason, and that was for the customers," he said of the companies' partnership. "We can make up all the noise we want around the edges on this thing, but this was all about driving customers — and, I will tell you, driving customers to make their lives easier and to drive interoperability."

Mundie said there are misperceptions about "the viability or practicality of interoperation between our products," but he said progress has been made in the past five months. A robust interoperability is needed rather than "two complete islands that have very, very skinny interconnection between them."

"There are a lot of elements of the agreement between Microsoft and Novell that show that it is possible to build bridges between these two environments," Mundie said.

Jaffe said the computing world during the past 30 years has featured perhaps 50 different operating platforms, but the future will have only Microsoft's Windows and Linux, an "open source" operating system.

"We want to give the value proposition of the openness, and that comes directly from Linux. We also want to have the tight integration that's achieved by a single company like Microsoft for the Windows platform. So our role is to take Linux, take the innovation and make it enterprise-ready. We build in the quality, the security and the scalability," he said.