Open Country Unveils Source Code Licensing Model for Systems Management Software

Open Country, a next-generation systems management software company, today announced it has begun licensing the source code to its flagship system management platform, OCM, the winner of LinuxJournal’s coveted 2006 Product Excellence Award for Best Linux Systems Management Solution. By licensing the source code to OCM Manager and OCM Provision, system and device manufacturers, system integrators, VARs, service providers and independent software vendors can significantly increase the value, differentiation and manageability of their offerings while reducing development costs and time to market.

Open Country empowers its OCM source code licensees’ end customers to effectively provision, image, manage, monitor, inventory, update and recover physical and virtual servers, desktops, blades, appliances and devices based on a variety of Linux platforms and distributions. Open Country becomes the first commercial systems management software vendor to license source code that supports over 20 Linux distributions, including products from Red Hat, Novell, Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, CentOS, Asianux, Red Flag, Haansoft, Co-Create, CS2C, TurboLinux, Miracle Linux, OpenLX and Mandriva. Selected OCM products also support Microsoft® Windows platforms.

“We evolved our business model in response to requests from customers who needed frequent ports to new hardware and to new operating systems in addition to new functionality,” said Laurent Gharda, CEO of Open Country. “Source code licensees can now take advantage of our modular, enterprise-grade systems management software by extending OCM to meet their unique market, customer and system needs, while further differentiating their products and services.”

“Open Country’s products have helped accelerate the adoption of Linux in the enterprise, especially in emerging markets,” said Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation consortium. "Now, by offering OCM’s source code to its licensees, Open Country is helping foster the growth of Linux into new classes of systems and devices that can be deployed and managed more easily than ever before.”

About Open Country:
Open Country helps organizations significantly reduce the cost and time to market to integrate manageability into their Linux hardware and software products. Open Country's OCM Universal Systems Management Suite won the 2006 Linux Journal Product Excellence Award for Best Systems Management Solution. OCM-enabled systems empower in-house IT staff as well as off-premises service providers to provision, image, manage, monitor, inventory, update and recover physical and virtual systems in a highly reliable and repeatable way. OCM supports the largest number of Linux distributions in the industry and runs on a variety of hardware architectures. Open Country is based in Redwood City, Calif. More information can be obtained by visiting www.opencountry.com.