At the opening of the LinuxWorld/Next Generation Data Center trade show in San Francisco, <A HREF="http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/22007.wss">IBM and Novell announced a new agreement to join forces</A> to capture a larger piece of the growing open source application server market. Under the agreement, Novell will deliver and support WebSphere Application Server Community Edition as part of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, making it the industry's most comprehensive open source-based server offering.

The agreement comes on the heels of the one millionth distribution of WAS CE, IBM's open source-based application server, which is based on Apache Geronimo and free to download and use. IBM and Novell will offer support and migration tools to help customers using JBoss to quickly and easily move to WAS CE. Combining WAS CE with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell provides an unbeatable combination for the small and medium-size business market, where Novell excels, and a compelling offering for enterprise customers with distributed computing environments, specifically in the retail and financial services industries. IBM and Novell will team on joint marketing and sales campaigns targeting customers around the world.