NOVELL EXPANDS MARKET START PROGRAM.

Novell has nearly doubled in the size of its Market Start program to help young open source companies gain commercial success. Open source companies Alfresco, Black Duck, EnterpriseDB, SpikeSource and Novacoast have become members of Novell's Market Start program, joining leading vendors like Pentaho, SugarCRM, MySQL AB, Lumen Software, and Groundwork, making the program a veritable "who's who" of open source innovators. Launched in 2005 to accelerate open source adoption worldwide, Market Start gives enterprise open source companies access to Novell's global sales and marketing channels to bring their solutions to the marketplace. As part of the expanded program, Novell will now allow Market Start partners to tap into Novell's network of more than 900 training partners worldwide. Novell will introduce new instructor-led and kit-based training on open source software solutions delivered by Novell and its Market Start partners. As a result, customers can gain new cost-effective, fully supported open source options for meeting their infrastructure and applications needs.

"We're seeing a tremendous interest in a range of customers for new open source applications like our content management solution," said John Powell, CEO of Alfresco. "Novell's Market Start program will help us reach customer s we couldn't get to on our own. More important, through Market Start, customers gain access to a greater range of supported open source applications, increasing flexibility and choice."

Novell is adding new training features to the Market Start program that will help both customers and partners get more value from open source-based solutions. Novell will provide the option to create and globally distribute administrative and end-user training kits for all Market Start partner solutions. Offering Market Start partner education kits leverages Novell's proven education infrastructure to accelerate the adoption of leading open source solutions through increasing customer options for training.

"Open source can deliver more value to customers than high-priced proprietary alternatives, but customers need to get a comfort level with open source," said John Roberts, CEO of SugarCRM. "By providing training on a range of partner offerings, including SugarCRM's, Novell is promoting open source broadly, giving customers one less reason not to try it. This is a huge new benefit for Market Start partners, and for customers."

Market Start gives emerging open source companies access to Novell's extensive global network of sales and channel partner resources. Through the program, Novell now offers robust, enterprise-strength databases, full-powered CRM, specialized applications, IT management solutions, and more. The addition of these new partners today will further expand these open source offerings to include:

* Alfresco - Alfresco brings the power of open source to the enterprise content management market, enabling unprecedented scale and a much lower total cost of ownership than proprietary systems.

* Black Duck - Black Duck software compliance management solutions help companies govern how software assets are created, managed and licensed. Black Duck's offerings help businesses take maximum advantage of open source software while at the same time ensuring that they satisfy the obligations associated with the code they use.

* EnterpriseDB - EnterpriseDB provides and supports an enterprise-class relational database management system (RDBMS) that is built on PostgreSQL, one of the world's most advanced open source databases.

* Novacoast - Novacoast's VoiceRD is the rapid deployment of a fully featured open source PBX. The deployment is complete with hardware, software, line provisioning, network integration, professional services and training.

* SpikeSource - SpikeSource provides free tested and certified open source software stacks, sells update and technical support service to enterprises, certifies commercial software for use in open source environments, and provides free testing and certification services for open source projects.

"Novell's Market Start partners are helping us build out the platform for the open enterprise," said John Dragoon, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at Novell. "The promise of open source goes well beyond Linux. The Novell Market Start program connects businesses to powerful applications from proven commercial open source and Linux- based software vendors. This is a smart - and supported - way for customers to fully leverage open source and open standards."

For more information on Novell's Market Start program, visit http://www.novell.com/linux/marketstart/index.html.

About Novell

Novell, Inc. (NASDAQ:NOVL) delivers Software for the Open Enterprise. With more than 50,000 customers in 43 countries, Novell helps customers manage, simplify, secure and integrate their technology environments by leveraging best-of-breed, open standards-based software. With over 20 years of experience, more than 5,000 employees, 5,000 partners and support centers around the world, Novell helps customers gain control over their IT operating environment while reducing cost.

Novell can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.novell.com/.

For more information, call 415/383-8408.