Novell And BEA Announce Strategic Partnership To Develop, Distribute TUXEDO Software

Press Release

Responding to Growing Market Demand, Companies to Enhance and Expand TUXEDO System Across NetWare, UNIX, NT Platforms

OREM, UT and SUNNYVALE, CA C January 29, 1996 C Novell, Inc. (NOVL) and BEA Systems, Inc. of Sunnyvale, CA. today announced a strategic partnership to develop and distribute the TUXEDO System, the leading open transaction management software used by businesses to develop and deploy multi-tier, client/server applications.

Under the terms of the agreement, both companies will invest development resources to enhance and expand the TUXEDO product line. Novell's development focus will be to integrate TUXEDO with NetWare, including its industry standard NetWare Directory Services (NDS), and NetWare Connect Service for managed Internet services. BEA will be responsible for developing the features and utilities needed for enterprise line-of-business solutions running on UNIX, NT, and all other non-NetWare platforms, including their integration with existing legacy systems. BEA will also become the master distributor of TUXEDO on non-NetWare platforms.

The TUXEDO System is a development, management and deployment environment for multi-tier client/server applications and is the leading portable transaction manager with more than 40 percent of the market. It is used to create scalable, high performance, secure, reliable business-critical applications, as well as more general purpose client/server applications. It runs on more than 35 platforms including NetWare, most UNIX variants, NT, and virtually every client operating environment. Customer demand for the TUXEDO System has doubled for the past two consecutive years.

The partnership advances Novell's strategy to enable a Smart Global Network by extending distributed network services such as TUXEDO's on-line transaction processing (OLTP) capabilities across multiple client and server platforms and into managed Internet solutions. Through the further integration of TUXEDO with NetWare, Novell will enable customers to more easily manage and secure transaction-intensive applications deployed across networks for use in electronic commerce, securities trading, manufacturing process control, retail inventory management, and other mission-critical areas.

Novell and BEA Announce Strategic Partnership

Since traditional TUXEDO users on UNIX or NT develop custom line-of-business solutions, Novell chose to partner with BEA because they will dedicate the resources required from both a consulting and channel perspective, as well as a product-features perspective to better meet these customer-specific needs.

"Our partnership with BEA enables Novell to maintain its commitment to TUXEDO and its rapidly expanding customer base while increasing Novell's focus in making TUXEDO services an integral part of the Smart Global Network spanning from workgroup LANs to the Internet," said Richard King, executive vice president and general manager of the Novell Systems Group. "As a leader in enterprise middleware solutions, BEA is the ideal partner to fully support TUXEDO market growth among its base of enterprise and systems customers. Novell believes the agreement will widen TUXEDO's market lead as the platform for open transaction intensive client/server applications."