open-slx announces Balsam Enterprise

open-slx GmbH extends its product portfolio with Balsam Enterprise, an 
offering to small and medium-sized businesses

Step by step, open-slx GmbH reaches autonomy in order to better facilitate 
openSUSE technology and to implement autonomous development paths.

Starting with Novell's next SUSE Linux Enterprise Version, open-slx plans to 
provide its own binary compatible Balsam Enterprise following the inspiring 
example of CentOS.

In doing so, we are concentrating on market segments nowadays not or not 
sufficiently served by Novell. As an example, particular SLES customers not in 
urgent need of certifications and highest support levels are currently 
suffering from the non-availability of a product that provides an appropriate 
price/performance ratio.

The product Balsam Enteprise will be provided by open-slx both as a free 
download version and a market-oriented version bundled with maintenance and 
support services. It is expected to reach the customer binary-compatible and 
at approximately 40-60% lower total costs than current SUSE Linux Enterprise 
offerings and is as such in particular targeting price-sensitive environments.

We estimate the medium-term market potential of Balsam Enterprise to 10-15% of 
existing SLES customers, not counting potential customer opportunities.
The introduction of the first Balsam Enterprise version should take place 
approximately 3-4 months after SLES 12 initially reached the market. As of 
today, we already provide our own support-infrastructure and publicly 
available information resources on level of the DACH region's market-leader in 
supporting Linux, ubuntuusers.de, with our own community portal at 
community.open-slx.de.

Dr. Stefan Werden, Managing director open-slx GmbH: "We are glad to provide an 
offering to small and medium-sized businesses in the future ? superior to the 
openSUSE Box, prospectively Balsam Professional, and with the best 
price/performance to market for enterprise openSUSE technology."

In the short term, Novell swept the contractual hurdles for open-slx out of 
the way and it hasn't been clear if these hurdles would have been resolved 
after the closing of the Novell Attachmate deal. open-slx is now able to 
immediately start with the implementation in order to provide a product just 
in time with SLES 12 and in line with market requirements.

Please visit www.open-slx.de and community.open-slx.de for further 
information. Also, please don't hesitate to contact us at enterprise@open-
slx.com if you have individual questions.

About open-slx GmbH
Since 2009, open-slx GmbH produces the former Novell Consumer-Product openSUSE 
Box and provides its own support-infrastructure for openSUSE, prospectively 
Balsam Professional. Furthermore, we are providing publicly available 
information resources at community.open-slx.de. open-slx is market-leader in 
consumer Linux-offerings with bundled support services. The most recent 
innovation is Plasma Active, a free multi-touch UI for tablet devices.
The company has more than 15 years of experience in serving the consumer and 
enterprise Linux markets. open-slx, based in Nuremberg/Germany, distributes 
its products worldwide both through partners and in direct sales.