Dell Joins SUSE appliance program

Workload management expert Novell on Tuesday announced Dell, a leading technology service provider, has joined the SUSE Appliance Program to build, deploy and maintain a wide range of its branded software appliances.

This agreement will enable Dell to deliver applications as ready-to-deploy virtual or hardware appliances powered by SUSE Linux Enterprise.

?Partnering with Novell helps to broaden and strengthen our Linux product offerings,? said Sally Stevens, vice president of Platform Marketing, Dell.

?By developing software appliances on SUSE Linux Enterprise, our joint customers get a flexible and cost effective solution for delivering applications to physical, virtual and cloud computing environments. We selected Novell because they provided an easy way for us to package and deliver software appliances.?

Leveraging the SUSE Appliance Program from Novell, Dell will be able to deliver ?plug and play? appliances that lower the cost and complexity of deploying applications for their customers.

Under the terms of the agreement, Dell will leverage Novell?s appliance-creation and lifecycle management tools to build fully-supported virtual and hardware appliances as well as distribute application and operating system patches and updates.

The software appliance form factor consists of a pre-configured, ready-to-run combination of operating system, middleware and application. IDC forecasts the software appliance market will break the $1 billion threshold by 2011 and will grow to $3.7 billion by 2014.1

The SUSE Appliance Program is a key component of Novell?s strategy to lead the rapidly emerging intelligent workload management market.

Built on the SUSE Linux Enterprise platform, the SUSE Appliance Program is transforming the way software vendors package and distribute software offerings, enabling them to quickly deliver applications to physical, virtual and cloud environments, reduce sales cycles and pursue new market opportunities.