IBM Teams With Red Hat to Make IBM(R) Workplace(TM) Services Express Software Available to Red Hat Enterprise Linux Customers

LinuxWorld -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Red Hat announced an agreement that enables organizations to evaluate, for a period of ninety (90) days, a combined IBM® Workplace Services Express v2.5 collaboration software and Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system solution. The agreement will make it easier for customers, including small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and individual departments within large companies, to test Workplace collaborative software in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform environment.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux and IBM Workplace Services Express will be preinstalled in a VMware environment and packaged as a virtual machine that can be downloaded electronically from Red Hat Network. This will allow access to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and IBM Workplace Services Express in a preinstalled environment, reducing the effort required for a customer or prospect to deploy, use and evaluate a working installation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and IBM Workplace Services Express.

Workplace Services Express provides team rooms, instant messaging, document management and portal capability in a single, integrated interface, and is specifically designed to meet the collaborative needs of customers with a limited amount of users, including SMBs and individual departments within large companies. Workplace Services Express allows customers to easily deliver and manage business applications as well as share and integrate information with employees, contractors and partners. By providing evaluation copies of Workplace Services Express with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, IBM and Red Hat are providing Red Hat Enterprise Linux customers with an open standards-based, flexible solution that can help lower IT costs and increase organizational productivity.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux enables organizations to realize the benefits of open source innovation throughout their IT environment. Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides customers with a reliable, scalable computing platform delivering a high level of security and performance. According to Red Hat, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is supported on hundreds of hardware systems across seven different architectures and over a thousand software applications, providing businesses with multiple tools to help manage their cost of ownership.

Today's agreement marks the latest addition to IBM's portfolio of Express offerings for the SMB market. While not limited to SMB customers, IBM Workplace Services Express and Red Hat Enterprise Linux will present an attractive option for SMBs looking to build a collaborative, Linux-ready solution for their organization without investing significant time or IT resources.

With IBM Workplace Services Express, customers can run a portal, email, team rooms and instant messaging on a single Red Hat Enterprise Linux server, which can help lower the total cost of ownership and streamline the administration of a customer's team collaboration solution. And the portal capabilities in Workplace Services Express enable customers to integrate a broad spectrum of business applications, which gives customers collaboration capabilities within the context of the applications they use everyday. Workplace Services Express is also part of IBM's Solutions Builder Express Portfolio, which provides tools, documentation, and support for IBM business partners that are working with IBM software to design solutions for their SMB customers.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is designed for heterogeneous IT environments, and comes with built-in graphical tools that make it easy for non-Linux experts to install and administer Linux systems. Additionally, each subscription to Red Hat Enterprise Linux includes a web-based system administration tool called Red Hat Network, which streamlines system management for IT administrators. The Red Hat Network also includes additional tools and capabilities that make it easier for system administrators to manage, deploy and provision systems as needed, without having to add additional resources.

"Workplace Services Express is designed to meet our customers' collaboration needs without eating up a lot of IT resources, and IBM's multi-platform approach helps our customers avoid the vendor lock-in that they experience with other collaboration platforms," said Ken Bisconti, vice president, Workplace, Portal and Collaboration Software, IBM. "And by offering a trial copy of Workplace Services Express with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we're teaming with one of the industry's leading Linux providers to give SMBs an additional choice for their collaborative computing platform to help them manage costs while increasing performance."

"Working with IBM, Red Hat is looking forward to introducing small to medium organizations to a highly reliable and affordable solution for Linux," said Tim Yeaton, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Red Hat. "IBM Workplace Services Express features a wide range of office and collaboration functionality while Red Hat Enterprise Linux presents itself as a great platform alternative for the SMB."