While on-demand software has proven itself as secure in the marketplace, some customers remain unconvinced and would much prefer an on-premises version of software. Novell heard the request of SUSE Studio users and provided a separate version to be used inside the corporate firewall. Datamation has the details.
To date, Novell has had strong usage of its online SUSE Studio Linux appliance development service, with over 250,000 software appliances built. Even with that success, Novell (NASDAQ: NOVL) sees a need to expand the effort with a new SUSE Appliance Toolkit providing an on-premises version of SUSE Studio, as well as a new Lifecycle Management Server to manage appliance updates.
With SUSE Studio, users are able to build their own software appliance with an application running on top of a SUSE Linux operating system. The market of Linux-based software appliance was originally pioneered by rival rPath.The new on-premises version of SUSE Studio brings that same capability to enterprises and software vendors (ISVs) to run behind their own firewalls.
“SUSE Studio online is perfectly stable, but going on-premise is really more of a security concern, as the No. 1 reason why some people don’t adopt the cloud is security,” Matt Richards, director of emerging technology at Novell, told InternetNews.com. “Studio on-site is about providing a local, theoretically more secure approach. But with over 55,000 users and over 250,000 appliances built online, we’re not really worried about it.”
Richards added that the online version of SUSE Studio is updated every week, which is a pace that the on-premises version of SUSE Studio will not keep. While he noted that the on-site version will still get regular updates, they just won’t be as rapid as the online service.
