Levanta, a private company headquartered in San Francisco, won a major award here at LinuxWorld Conference and Expo yesterday, on its home territory. Its Intrepid M appliance was chosen as the 'Most Innovative Hardware Solution' in LinuxWorld's Product Excellence Awards, managed by the editors of LinuxWorld Magazine and announced at the show by SYS-CON Media West Coast bureau chief Roger Strukhoff (pictured).

"The industry has been waiting a long time for more sophisticated Linux management tools," said Matt Mosman, CEO of Levanta. "Attendees here at LinuxWorld Expo have been amazed by how much the new Intrepid M appliance simplifies Linux management."

For years, said Mosman, major Linux shops such as Boscov's and Electronic Arts have used Levanta's management and provisioning software on mainframe and x86-based servers. "With the release of the Intrepid M, Levanta has taken its enterprise-proven software and bundled it into a plug-and-play Linux management solution - for enterprises, lines of business, and even SME environments," he added.

To make it even easier to use, Mosman explained, the Intrepid M ships ready-to-go templates for a variety of workstations and servers, as well as the open source software needed to deploy them.

"Users can also create their own templates and add software of their choice to the repository," said Mosman.

Levanta can be found on the Web at www.levanta.com.