DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / AUGUST 11, 2003; VOL. 2 NO. 32    ( Table of Contents )

Breaking News - Operating Systems & Middleware:

Linux Vendors Form Support Alliance

TSANet (Technical Support Alliance Network), the industry's largest vendor- neutral support alliance, announced the formation of another important support community comprised of vendors of the Linux operating system. The new Linux support community will initially include BEA, Dell, EMC, HP, Network Appliance, Novell, SuSE, Unisys, VERITAS, and VMware, with additional vendors expected in the near future. "The implementation of the Linux Open Group Relationship enables standard collaboration processes and mechanisms for independent software vendors, operating system manufacturers, and independent hardware suppliers," said Kai Altenfelder, director of support services at SuSE Linux AG. "This enables SuSE to guarantee optimum support for complex, mission-critical enterprise solutions."

TSANet's new community model has gained wide acceptance over the past twelve months as a quick and effective way to create specialized multivendor relationships to support mutual, enterprise-level customers. "The TSANet community model is rapidly becoming the de-facto method of alliance formation in the industry," said Dennis Smeltzer, executive director of TSANet. "The Linux community has the common objective of providing mission-critical support to enterprise-level customers. TSANet is delighted to have been approached by Linux industry stakeholders to facilitate and deploy this important community."

"We view TSANet's community model infrastructure as an efficient way to establish collaboration at the enterprise level," said Steve Geary, research and development manager, HP Open Source Development Lab. "This open source model encourages open collaboration on support issues relating to customers using or looking at using Linux in the enterprise."

The Linux community is the fourth open group community formed within TSANet, thereby further increasing the opportunity for its members to resolve mutual customer issues. It follows the successful adoption of previous communities including Microsoft Datacenter, which allows collaboration among vendors with products on the Windows Datacenter operating system, the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), which addresses support issues for storage vendors, and Mission-Critical Customer, which supports enterprise-level customers in mission-critical environments.

About TSANet

Founded in 1993, TSANet (Technical Support Alliance Network) is a worldwide, multivendor alliance that offers an industry-wide forum to facilitate servicing multivendor customers while providing an infrastructure for more efficient multivendor problem solving. Membership consists of more than one hundred software and hardware companies, including industry giants such as EMC, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Sun Microsystems, Unisys, and VERITAS. TSANet can be reached at (913) 345-9311 or at www.tsanet.org.