IT infrastructure and solutions vendor Novell saw its net income leap by 89% in its first quarter of 2010, even though the company’s revenues fell by 5.8%.

Profit for the period stood at $20.2 million, up from $10.7 million in the same quarter of last year, while overall sales were down to $202.4 million. That profit increase resulted from a reduction in operating expenses, which the company attributed to fluctuations in currency exchange rates and a "continued focus on expense management".

Takings from Novell’s open platform solutions for the quarter increased 6.4% to $39.2 million, the vast majority of which was derived from sales of its Linux products. Maintenance and subscriptions revenues crept up 0.1%, while software licenses and services slumped by 25% and 20%, respectively.

Earlier this month, the company announced a partnership with virtualisation provider Citrix that will allow for interoperability between Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Citrix’s XenServer. In a recent interview with Information Age, Novell product director Richard Whitehead explained that the deal was part of its Intelligent Workload Management strategy, which aims to encourage the movement of enterprise workloads into the cloud.

“We need to partner with key vendors like Citrix to work in a virtual environment, and this is absolutely part of that strategy,” he said. “Mission critical workloads are ready to move into the cloud. Security is fundamental to running things not only in the public cloud, but also internally, so these workloads need to have intelligence built into them.”