Novell Market Start Program Continues to Drive Open Source Innovation

Novell Market Start Program Continues to Drive Open Source Innovation

In its continuing effort to encourage open source software adoption, Novell today announced new additions to its Market Start program to help young open source companies achieve commercial success. Open source companies Centeris, JasperSoft, Virtuas and Zmanda have become members of Novell’s Market Start program, joining leading open source vendors including Alfresco, MySQL and SugarCRM. Launched in late 2005 to promote innovation and accelerate open source adoption worldwide, Market Start gives enterprise open source companies access to Novell’s global sales and marketing channels to bring their solutions to market.

“Combining the power of business intelligence with the reach of open source provides unprecedented access to data to a larger business audience than ever before,” said Paul Doscher, CEO of JasperSoft. “Novell’s Market Start program will expand our market reach dramatically, exposing many more customers to query, reporting and analysis solutions at an attractive price point.”

Zmanda CEO Chander Kant said, “Novell has led the way for businesses to deploy proven open source technologies within their IT infrastructure. By joining Market Start, Zmanda will be able to work closely with Novell to provide the market with a robust and easy-to-use alternative for data backup and recovery.”

In an early showcase of success, Novacoast – a leading Novell® solution provider and Market Start participant – combined technologies from a number of Market Start partners to create an integrated solution. Working with Alfresco for document management, SugarCRM for customer relationship management and Novell’s GroupWise® for collaboration, Novacoast has leveraged its voice-over-IP offering, VoiceRD*, to allow customers to seamlessly share information, collaborate and communicate with their customers in a cost-effective way. This type of open source-based solution was previously unavailable to mid-market customers.

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