Novell Goes to Market with Leading Open Source Application Providers

Novell Market Start program delivers viable and valuable IT choices to customers

9 August 2005

Novell today announced the selection of key open source application partners as part of its growing Market Start program. Novell® Market Start, announced earlier this year, aligns open source solutions with Novell's open source operating infrastructure to bring new, cost-effective solutions to market. The first partners in the program include Astaro, GroundWork, InsynQ, Lumen Software, Pentaho and SugarCRM. As a result, customers benefit from enterprise-ready open source applications that increase their IT choices at extremely competitive prices, backed by enterprise-class support from Novell.

“Building and maintaining a community is a critical success factor for any Linux distribution,” said Dan Kusnetzky, IDC vice president of system software research. “Novell is seeking to create a strong community based upon the foundation of its long history of working with partners and its position as an enterprise software provider.”

David Axmark, co-founder and vice president of open source relations for MySQL AB, said, “By sharing its experience and sales network, Novell's innovativeprogram can help fast-growing open source and Linux software vendors gain valuable visibility in the corporate IT world. Novell is encouraging its customers, resellers and partners to become more familiar and comfortable with the benefits of open source. In turn, this helps everyone in the ecosystem – from the largest companies to the solo programmer.”

The Novell Market Start program was designed to meet the growing demand from companies who desire to implement and integrate open source applications into their operating environments. While many open source application providers exist today, they lack a global infrastructure for sales and support critical to gaining adoption of their solutions. Under the Market Start program, they will receive marketing, channel and support services from

Novell, enabling them to grow their solutions without worrying about growing their go-to-market infrastructure.

“Our customers want to leverage the growing number of open source application providers, but also want to minimize their implementation and deployment risk,” said Bill Hewitt, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at Novell. “With Market Start, they get leading-edge innovation with world-class support. It's a win for our customers, our partners and for the entire open source community.”

Click here to view quote sheet for comments from the initial Novell Market Start partners. For more information about the Market Start program, please visit http://www.novell.com/linux/marketstart.

About Novell

Novell, Inc. (Nasdaq: NOVL) is a leading provider of infrastructure software and services to over 50,000 customers in 43 countries. With more than 20 years of experience in data center, workgroup and desktop solutions, Novell's 6,000 employees, 5,000 partners and support centers around the world are meeting customer requirements for identity-driven computing and Linux solutions. By providing enterprise-class software and support for commercial and open source software, Novell delivers increased operating flexibility and choice at a lower total cost of ownership. More information about Novell can be found at http://www.novell.com.

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