"Novell has long been a champion of secure remote access, and they recognize the benefits of IPsec virtual private networks for their customers," said Ken Bantoft, VP Business Development of Xelerance Corporation, and the Openswan product manager. "Novell's sponsorship of Openswan allows for the continued development and maintenance of the project and lets us offer new services that will secure our position as the leading IPsec open source project."

Novell's sponsorship of Openswan includes contributions to the development of its projects. IPsec, the standard way of sending sensitive information over unprotected networks such as the Internet, is the basis for the most widely used VPNs (virtual private networks) among corporate customers. Based on the FreeS/WAN codebase, which was started in 1998, Openswan is running in production on tens of thousands of Linux servers worldwide.

"Security is a key concern for our customers, and we responded by providing the first major Linux distribution with an IPsec VPN," said Markus Rex, vice president and general manager of Novell's SUSE® LINUX business unit. "Secure VPNs are an important part of an enterprise-class Linux distribution, and we look forward to contributing to the development of the Openswan project."

ICSA Labs offers vendor-agnostic testing and certification of security products. The IPsec 1.0D certification builds upon previous testing processes for cryptography and standards compliance but also requires that products demonstrate and adhere to standardized logging and stricter interoperability. As a result, customers now have the confidence that the IPsec certified products they use are interoperable across vendor product lines while providing for confidentiality and data integrity.

Novell BorderManager provides proxy-cache, VPN and firewall services with powerful directory-integrated features that enable organizations to control user access to corporate resources and monitor their Internet activities. BorderManager supports connectivity from Linux clients as well as from Microsoft Windows* and Apple Macintosh*. The access control provided by Novell BorderManager is a key component of Novell Nsure secure identity management solutions. For more information about the Openswan project please visit http://www.openswan.org, and for more information about Novell BorderManager please visit http://www.novell.com/bordermanager.

About Novell
Novell, Inc. (Nasdaq: NOVL) is a leading provider of information solutions that deliver secure identity management (Novell Nsure™), Web application development (Novell exteNd™) and cross-platform networking services (Novell Nterprise™), all supported by strategic consulting and professional services (Novell NgageSM). Active in the open source community with its Ximian® and SUSE® LINUX brands, Novell provides a full range of Linux products and services for the enterprise, from the desktop to the server. Novell's vision of one Net – a world without information boundaries – helps customers realize the value of their information securely and economically. For more information, call Novell's Customer Response Center at (888) 321-4CRC (4272) or visit http://www.novell.com. Press should visit http://www.novell.com/pressroom.

Novell, BorderManager and Ximian are registered trademarks; Nsure, exteNd and Nterprise are trademarks; and Ngage is a service mark of Novell, Inc. in the United States and other countries. SUSE is a registered trademark of SUSE LINUX AG, a Novell company. *All third-party trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Xelerence Corporation is a team of experienced software developers, network designers and consultants who are providing support, development and network design services for secure, Linux based systems.

Xelerance Corporation provides third-level support for Openswan, Freeradius, DNSSEC and DHCP. Xelerance's customers are systems integrators, VARs, governments, and Linux distribution vendors.

Xelerance Corporation has offices in Ottawa and Toronto, Canada, Amsterdam, NL and San Jose, CA, USA.

Press Contact for Novell: Rod Anderson Novell, Inc Phone: (801) 861-3407 E-mail: roanderson@novell.com

Press contact for Xelerance: Ken Bantoft Xelerance Corporation 470 Dawson Avenue Ottawa, ON K1Z 5V7 Phone: +1 905 257 3392 x 101 Email: ken@xelerance.com