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BM (NYSE: IBM) and Novell today announced a new agreement to join
forces to capture a larger piece of the growing open source application
server market. Under the agreement, Novell will deliver and support
WebSphere Application Server Community Edition (WAS CE) as part of
SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server, making it the industry's most
comprehensive open source-based server offering.
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The agreement comes on the heels of the one millionth distribution
of WAS CE, IBM's open source-based application server, which is based
on Apache Geronimo and free to download and use. IBM and Novell will
offer support and migration tools to help customers using JBoss to
quickly and easily move to WAS CE. Combining WAS CE with SUSE Linux
Enterprise Server from Novell® provides an unbeatable combination for
the small and medium-size business (SMB) market, where Novell excels,
and a compelling offering for enterprise customers with distributed
computing environments, specifically in the retail and financial
services industries. IBM and Novell will team on joint marketing and
sales campaigns targeting customers around the world.
By entering into the agreement, IBM gains access to Novell's SMB
market leadership, providing new sales opportunities from Novell's
existing customer base. In return, Novell gains a strong global
partner, allowing it to tap into IBM's worldwide sales force. The
partnership will provide customers with an enterprise-ready open source
alternative to JBoss, while developers will have an opportunity to
build on a tested platform in WAS CE, with the full support of IBM,
Novell and the open source community as they build their applications.
“Customers today are looking for an integrated solution to solve
their application development needs,” said Roger Levy, senior vice
president and general manager of Open Platform Solutions for Novell.
“Novell and IBM have partnered to bring customers a best-in-class
experience by delivering two powerful software platforms through one
channel. Now, when customers need support for their open source
operating system or their open source application server, they can get
it with one phone call to Novell.”
In addition to the agreement with Novell, IBM is also introducing
the next release of WAS CE -- WAS CE 2.0. WAS CE 2.0 will have full
Java EE 5 standard support providing greater developer productivity
leading to reduced costs, code re-usability, leveraging of existing
assets, and increased IT responsiveness to business needs. A research
report from Evans Data found that WAS CE gained share nearly three
times as fast as JBoss in 2006 and the Java EE 5 certification can help
IBM extend that leadership.*
"By teaming with Novell, we're able to provide customers around the
world with unmatched open source technologies and support," said Tom
Rosamilia, general manager, IBM Application and Integration Middleware.
"The one millionth distribution of WAS CE validates the fact that we're
meeting the needs of developers and businesses looking to embrace open
source-based technologies, and the agreement with Novell allows us to
take that success to the next level."
WAS CE helps developers reduce the complexity of application
development by pre-integrating the most common services for building
applications. Based on core open source technology from the Java EE 5
certified Apache Geronimo application server, WAS CE 2.0 and related
subscription support can help customers begin to deploy a service
oriented architecture (SOA). WAS CE provides the flexibility to reuse
existing services, increases time to value, and enables expanded access
to core applications quickly.
With the introduction of WAS CE 2.0, the IBM WebSphere Application
Server family now allows customers to rapidly develop and deploy
applications that leverage new Java EE 5 standards. For customers
looking at open source solutions, WAS CE 2.0 is the best option for
those who need quick access to application server technology with no
upfront costs. It enables businesses to accelerate development and
deployment cycles by harnessing the latest innovations from the open
source community.
One customer benefiting from WAS CE is Arena Solutions, a provider of on-demand product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions.
"Arena Solutions has always believed in using open source
technologies in its core infrastructure,” said Eric Larkin, chief
technology officer of Arena Solutions. “As part of the open source
community, we've been able to achieve substantial business and
technical benefits. When we decided to migrate our Arena PLM software
to a more standards-based and modern development and delivery platform,
the natural choice was to look at open source Java EE application
servers. We chose IBM's WAS CE over other development platforms like
JBoss because of their level of support and ongoing involvement and
commitment to open source."
WAS CE, based on IBM's May 2005 acquisition of Gluecode, Inc.,
provides a flexible foundation for developing and deploying Java
applications. Technical support is offered through an annual
subscription. IBM also offers its partners free sales, marketing and
technical support to use WAS Community Edition. This allows partners to
provide departmental and small and medium sized customers with an open
source foundation for a service oriented architecture that can scale to
meet business needs. Over 400 IBM partners currently offer solutions on
WAS CE.
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