Dell Joins Novell's SUSE Appliance Program

Novell has announced that it has added another partner to the already large list of big names in its SUSE Appliance Program. Dell is now part of the program and the hardware manufacturer will now offer solutions for businesses based on tools like SUSE Studio, powered by Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise.

"We have teamed with Dell for many years to deliver innovative and robust solutions to our joint customers," Joe Wagner, senior vice president and general manager of Global Alliances at Novell, said.

"We are pleased Dell is furthering our alliance by building and deploying their appliances with the SUSE Appliance Program. Appliances are the easiest and quickest way for Dell to package and deliver optimized, fully-supported applications to its customers," he added.

Dell will offer a number of appliances built on top of the SUSE Appliance Program. The company will provide complete hardware plus software solutions, or virtual appliances.

Dell will offer complete solutions, customized to the customers' needs. This will include all of the tools in the SUSE Appliance Program Toolkit, one of them being a local version of SUSE Studio called Onsite.

"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."

The SUSE Appliance Program has been very successful for Novell, despite being less than two years old. SUSE Studio alone has 651,000 appliances created by some 103,000 registered users.

Novell believes that the market for software appliances will continue to see big growth in the coming years. Based on independent research, the market will reach $1 billion in sales this year and $3.7 billion by 2014.