Richard Seibt, Former SUSE and Novell Executive, Joins Collax Board

Published: September 19, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Richard Seibt, a bigwig of the formerly independent German Linux distributor, SUSE, and a one-time executive of SUSE's acquirer, Novell, has joined the board of directors of yet another German Linux startup: Collax.

Collax, which has dual headquarters in Bedford, Massachusetts and Munich, Germany, and its Collax Business Server, which was launched in North America in mid-August, are not exactly household names in the data center. But the people behind Collax, including Seibt, want to change that.

The Collax Business Server is a version of Linux that its creators claim has been made so easy to use that you do not need Linux experience to set it up, and that you need no more IT experience than you would need to set up a Windows box--which is the touchstone in the small and medium business space. In many ways, Collax is trying to finish the work that the team behind SUSE Linux originally started so many years ago--to make Linux easy to use. Seibt, as the former chairman and CEO of SUSE, was an integral part of that team, and the founders of Collax have not only got Seibt to invest in Collax, which he did last year, but now they have asked him to join the board of directors to help steer the company.

Collax was founded in May 2005 by Olaf Jacobi, who has managed a number of European startups, and Boris Nalbach, the former chief technology officer at SUSE before Novell acquired it in 2003. Nalbach is now CTO at Collax, and Jacobi is CEO. Earlier this year, Paula Hunter, who used to run the UnitedLinux collaboration effort between SUSE, Caldera Systems, and Turbolinux and who was marketing and business director for Open Source Development Labs, was named vice president of marketing for North America at Collax.

Perhaps most significantly for the future growth of Collax, in February, Intel Capital, Atlas Venture Partners, and Wellington Partners together gave Collax $8.4 million in Series A venture capital funding, which is being used to cover the costs of the company's North American launch.

Seibt is also on the boards of Open-Xchange, a SUSE and Novell Linux groupware partner, and Scali, which has commercialized the Beowulf supercomputer clustering software for Linux.

"What impresses me about Collax is the concept--open source-based technology that can be operated without Linux know-how, and which integrates 'best-of-breed' open source software and applications," said Seibt in a statement. "It's a product ideally suited to SMBs and, frankly, the next big wave of Linux adoption."

Collax has 8,000 installations worldwide for its products, with a heavy concentration in Germany.

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