VIENNA, AUSTRIA: VDEL, a Services Distribution company has announced the general availability of the OpenReferent Desktop Solution based on IBM Lotus Software and the Red Hat linux platform.

This Microsoft desktop alternative brings together the strengths of IBM Lotus software including Notes e-mail and calendaring, Lotus Symphony documents, the Red Hat Linux operating system, and VDEL document management application services.

The solution is a result of the recently announced new Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) software agreement between IBM and VDEL GmbH.

"The fact that the OpenReferent is available also with the Lotus Express products means that we are actually addressing the whole market - from SMB to Large organizations´ said Tagi Yapparov, general manager of IT, a Russian Integrator. ´We see a great opportunity for people actually starting to use desktops based on Open source platform and to reap the benefits of Linux."

"Customers finally have a true alternative to break out of the grip of Microsoft," said Milan Prohaska, director for business development, VDEL.

"Security, reliability, scalability - OpenReferent beats Microsoft offering hands down on all counts. Total cost of ownership - at least 50 percent savings. And if this is not enough - the pure migration cost benefit of migrating Windows XP to OpenReferent versus migration to Vista, compels responsible IT managers to at least evaluate this exciting offering based on the world leading technologies from IBM and RedHat. The vision laid down a decade ago from these two world leaders in open source is now finally coming to a desktop near you.´

"IBM is committed to giving businesses freedom of choice and the interoperability afforded by open standards," said Kevin Cavanaugh, vice president, IBM Lotus Software. "The OpenReferent solution, embedded with the full breadth of Lotus software, is a great response to local market demand for affordable collaboration based on open standards."

Pogodin, deputy general director of Post of Russia, said: "Post of Russia, which has 42,000 post offices through out the country, can significantly lower the cost of ownership of the Information System." Post of Russia is one of the first customers that signed up to evaluate themove from Microsoft based desktops to OpenReferent solution.

Open Referent is based on the recently announced IBM Lotus Open Collaboration Client Solution with Red Hat.

Business partners classified as Red Hat Advanced Business Partners and Lotus-authorized IBM Business Partners may sell the Red Hat and IBM Lotus products globally with a Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription, and may additionally offer a six-month Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop trial.

IBM's Open Collaboration Client Solution includes IBM Lotus Notes e-mail and collaboration software for which more than 140 million seat licenses have been sold worldwide, and IBM Lotus Sametime, an award-winning unified communication and collaboration platform, including the industry leading business instant messaging solution. Integrated Lotus Sametime with instant messaging and chat comes with Lotus Notes as part of the core solution.

It also includes IBM Lotus Symphony, a set of productivity tools for creating documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, and IBM WebSphere Portal, a server-based foundation for building portal applications and services, with optional accelerators.

IBM Portals can be accessed through a common entry point via browsers such as Microsoft Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. Another key element of the solution is IBM Lotus Connections, the industry's first social software for business. The open solution also includes IBM Lotus Quickr, a team-based collaboration and document management software and IBM Lotus Expeditor, an Eclipsed-based Rich Client Platform (RCP) for developing and deploying applications.