Novell Offers Online Gallery For ISV Appliance Partners
The gallery is Novell’s latest addition to its year-old SUSE Appliance Program through which the vendor provides development technology, including SUSE Studio and the SUSE Appliance Toolkit, along with tech support and marketing assistance.
Software appliances are preconfigured combinations of an operating system, middleware and application that are easy to deploy and run. IDC has predicted that the software appliance market will reach $1.8 billion by 2012.
Novell describes the SUSE Appliance Program as a key element of its push into the market for intelligent workload management software. The company said more than 310,000 appliances have been developed through the program.
The SUSE gallery serves as a central repository for ISV-built appliances, with each appliance having a dedicated Web page and unique URL, according to Novell. Developers also can publish appliance templates and tailored operating system images on the site.
Novell isn’t charging ISVs and developers for putting their commercial and community-oriented appliances on the gallery site.