Novell has announced a new initiative to increase revenue and profitability for solution providers and consulting partners who specialise in selling Novell technologies.

Among other benefits, Novell will offer enhanced partner education, joint marketing opportunities, and free technical support for those partners demonstrating expertise in selling and supporting Novell software. Novell is also creating a new partner executive sales team, which will be dedicated to, and compensated on, partner success. Working with Novell now gives partners even more compelling options for delivering IT value to their customers.

"A thriving solution provider and consulting ecosystem selling and servicing Novell software is critical to us and a significant investment focus of the company," said Ron Hovsepian, Novell president and CEO. "We've made real progress in expanding our partner ecosystem this last year, with important agreements with Capgemini, Dell, IBM, Lenovo, Microsoft, SAP and more. We're putting even more focus on our solution provider and consulting partners as we move into 2008. We're going to make it easier and more profitable for these partners to deliver Novell-based solutions, and we'll encourage customers to have their IT needs met by our partners, rather than directly from Novell."