Novell announced it is delivering comprehensive technical support for the JBoss Enterprise Middleware System (JEMS), including the market-leading JBoss Application Server. This latest cooperation between the two companies makes Novell the first and only Linux infrastructure vendor to offer enterprise-level support for JEMS. This development builds on previous agreements in which Novell became a JBoss Authorized Service Partner, bundled JBoss Application Server as the default app server on Novell’s SUSETM LINUX Enterprise Server 9, and provided engineering contributions to the development of JBoss Portal. With today's announcement, customers now have a single point of contact to support their mission critical applications.

“JEMS has quickly become the middleware standard, and now, with Novell’s support across multiple operating platforms, we anticipate JEMS to become even more rapidly adopted in the enterprise,” said Bob Bickel, vice president of strategy and corporate development, JBoss, Inc. “Our Professional Open Source model is about making open source safe for the enterprise and giving customers choices when it comes to deployment. JBoss on SUSE Linux from Novell gives customers high performance at a competitive price and true enterprise-level support.”

Novell is now providing, for the first time, worldwide technical support for the entire JEMS platform, which includes market-leading products like JBoss Application Server, the Hibernate object/relational mapping (ORM) engine, the Apache Tomcat JSP/servlet engine and JBoss Portal. Under the agreement, Novell is offering 24x7 enterprise production support on any operating platform on which JEMS products run.

“JBoss has seen tremendous adoption in the market of its open source middleware platform, and the combination of JEMS on top of SUSE Linux gives customers a powerful, cost effective foundation for running their business applications,” said David Patrick, vice president and general manager, Linux, Open Source Platforms and Services for Novell. “Our expanded agreement reduces cost and risk for customers and gives them peace of mind as they move critical applications in their data centers to an open source platform.”