Siebel Systems users will soon be able to deploy their applications on an open-source platform—a move that brings more credibility to the open-source movement among business applications providers.
Siebel Systems Inc. of San Mateo, Calif., announced an expanded partnership with infrastructure provider Novell Inc. at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco.
Under the terms of the agreement, Novell, of Waltham, Mass., will provide support for Siebels CRM (customer relationship management) sales, marketing and analytics applications on its SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9, and Siebel users will have access to open-source platform support from Novell.
Novells SLES 9 is built on the Linux 2.6 kernel. It supports clustering for automatic failover and provides Hotplug services that let users make hardware changes without disrupting the system.
SLES 9 also supports application and development services using Apache, JBoss, Tomcat, MySQL and PostgreSQL.
Siebels applications are available as behind-the-firewall implementations or through a hosted, on-demand model.
The two companies will work together to develop Siebels applications for Novells Linux platform. The partnership, which joins Siebels product development team and Novells engineering team, will work out support for open standards that optimizes Siebels applications for scalability requirements.
The combination should let system administrators more quickly deploy, configure and operate their systems, officials said.
IT research company Gartner Inc., based in Stamford, Conn., found that while Linux and open-source software products have generated interest, adoption by enterprise users has been slow. Gartners latest survey found that just over 1 percent of enterprise users were running Linux desktops in the fourth quarter of 2004.
Novell also announced at the conference that it has added several new open-source application providers to its Market Start program, including network security provider Astaro Corp., IT management company GroundWork Open Source Solutions Inc., business applications software developer Insynq Inc., remote access provider Lumen Software, business intelligence software provider Pentaho Corp. and SugarCRM Inc.
Novells Market Start aligns open-source software with its open-source operating infrastructure.
