More new partners to drive the open source applications business
May 3rd, 2007 by Bruce Lowry 
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Novell continues to build out its partner ecosystem around Linux and open source. A couple of years back, we launched our Market Start program to increase the breadth and depth of Linux solutions for small and medium enterprises. The program addresses one of the key challenges for small tech start-ups – reaching a large enough customer audience to become financially viable. Our Market Start program accelerates go-to market activities with Linux and open source companies through Novell sales channels to reach more customers.
The program already includes many of the leading open source application vendors in the market: Alfresco, AppGen, Astaro, Black Duck, Centeris, EnterpriseDB, Groundwork, Jaspersoft, Lumen, MySQL, Pentaho, SpikeSource, SugarCRM, VoiceRD and Zmanda. These companies offer a wide range of applications for Linux, from customer relationship management to business intelligence to databases and more.
In 2007, we've added another set of open source application leaders to the program:
CentricCRM – customer relationship management solutions that will run on a range of proprietary or open source platforms
Centrify – Active Directory-based solutions for auditing, access management and identity management for non-Windows environments, including SUSE Linux Enterprise
OpenLogic – software, stacks and services for managing open source environments
Liferay – open source portal solutions
Zenoss – open source systems management and monitoring
Anybody who had any doubts about whether open source has the power to go beyond operating systems and other infrastructure roles need look no further than this list of Novell Market Start partners. Together, we're making it increasingly easy for customers – big and small – to tap into the flexibility, cost benefits and performance power of open source.
May 3rd, 2007 at 2:58 pm
is XenSource part of market start? I did not see them listed above and presumably thought Novell was partnering with them to deliver Xen..
May 3rd, 2007 at 4:12 pm
[...] You can read more about the announcement on the Novell Open PR » Blog Archive » More new partners to drive the open source applications business. [...]
May 3rd, 2007 at 4:36 pm
Hi Jim. XenSource is not part of MarketStart. As you probably know, the Xen Hypervisor is an open source project run out of the University of Cambridge (UK). XenSource is a start-up company formed to commercialize Xen into an appliance. Since the Xen code is open source, everyone has access to it. Novell has taken the Xen code and incorporated it in SUSE Linux Enterprise. XenSource has taken the same code and created an appliance. There is no go-to-market partnership between Novell and XenSource, although we do occasionally collaborate with their engineers. Thanks.
May 3rd, 2007 at 4:55 pm
Bruce, thanks for clarifying. It just seems a bit strange Novell would not be partnering with the company you are relying on to build your hypervisor.
May 3rd, 2007 at 5:54 pm
Hi again Jim. The project came first, then XenSource was formed, so the project existed – and exists -independent of XenSource. Thanks.
May 3rd, 2007 at 6:05 pm
While it is good to se Novell build up this partner 'ecosystem' there seems to be a lack of Novell working with said partners. As an example you now have 2 Open source CRM venders, but nether of them have any support for GroupWise as a customer mail system. Also Novell has done very little to show how the products from these partner can bee intergrated into Novell focused environment, there needs to be white papers and app notes published.
From my point of view both Centrify (which does AD based tools) and OpenLogic need Novell to provide more detail on how these partners fit?
May 3rd, 2007 at 6:14 pm
Also are you aware that at times the text in the Novell Blog system breaks when viewed under IE6, but seems to work fine under FireFox?
In this blog under IE6 the text stops after the line starting "OpenLogic …
The underlying HTML seems to have 2 lines of Openoffice meta data at the point of the break before the information that should provide the line starting "Liferay ….
May 4th, 2007 at 11:21 am
Hi Roger..Sorry about the technical glitch. Yeah, sometimes we get metadata that seems to trip up IE. I try to catch those, but some slip thru. Thanks.
May 4th, 2007 at 1:47 pm
Roger, you are correct we need more partners supporting our existing product lines like GroupWise. We are working with our market start partners to do just that.
In regards to more materials to help partners and customers leverage these new solutions, that's underway as well. Look for more in the coming weeks.
May 5th, 2007 at 6:09 pm
Here's my vote to get CentricCRM integrated with Groupwise. Novell, please help them out on this. I've posted in their forums and only heard the sound of crickets. Centric is java and I'm sure a good java programmer using Groupwise SOAP could get it integrated in no time. We needed this kinda stuff done yesterday. Novell has to have a spare java programmer stuffed away somewhere
We love GW and Centric!
May 9th, 2007 at 7:16 am
Anybody who had any doubts about whether open source has the power to go beyond operating systems and other infrastructure roles need look no further than this list of Novell Market Start partners. Together, we’re making it increasingly easy for customers – big and small – to tap into the flexibility, cost benefits and performance power of open source.
This appears to be in contrast to Novell's "mixed source" philosophy as described by Stafford Masie:
May 9th, 2007 at 7:42 am
[...] Recently, Red Hat announced the Red Hat Exchange (RHX) program, an online marketplace for open source solutions. Well, Novell's Bruce Lowry wants to remind us of Novell's long-standing effort in this area, Market Start, and detail some recent additions to the program. Anybody who had any doubts about whether open source has the power to go beyond operating systems and other infrastructure roles need look no further than this list of Novell Market Start partners. Together, we’re making it increasingly easy for customers – big and small – to tap into the flexibility, cost benefits and performance power of open source. [...]