"A year after its debut, the SUSE Appliance Program has helped ISVs simplify distribution and deployment of their applications, get to market faster and reduce support costs for themselves and their customers," said Parag Patel, vice president, Global Strategic Alliances, VMware. "SUSE Gallery is another step forward in helping software vendors accelerate their customers' evolution to a virtualized data center as they progress on the journey to cloud computing."

SUSE Gallery is the latest addition to the SUSE Appliance Program, which is celebrating its one-year anniversary today. The SUSE Appliance Program is a comprehensive business and technology program that helps ISVs simplify appliance creation, reduce development and support costs, and extend applications to the cloud. A key technology component of the SUSE Appliance Program is SUSE Studio, the industry's most successful web-based appliance creation tool with more than 82,000 registered users worldwide. The Program also includes the SUSE Appliance Toolkit, which enables ISVs and enterprises to build, manage and update appliances regardless of location.

SUSE Gallery offers a free, web-based venue for ISVs and other users to publish and market their appliances. ISVs, corporate developers and enthusiasts can now share, promote, collaborate and freely exchange their appliances with others. Novell will not charge developers for putting their appliances in SUSE Gallery, nor will Novell charge end users for downloading appliances. SUSE Gallery provides a friction-free venue for the exchange of ideas, innovation and best practices across all sectors of the software industry.

To celebrate the launch of SUSE Gallery, Novell is also announcing the First Annual "Dister" Awards, a SUSE Studio award contest that will run from July 27 to September 30, 2010. Novell is looking for inventive minds to build the most innovative software appliances in two categories: "Community Use" and "Commercial Use". After Novell narrows the field to a list of finalists, a panel of industry-leading judges will then select and award each of the two winners a $10,000 grand prize.

SUSE Gallery is available now at www.susegallery.com or in the browse feature of SUSE Studio Online. For more information on the SUSE Appliance Program, visit www.novell.com/appliances.