Levanta announced that new Japanese reseller partner e-System corporation has made an additional commitment to more than $105-million yen in sales of Levanta's Intrepid M Linux management appliance. The agreement follows strong initial interest in the Intrepid M from e-System's Linux customer base, including a major deal with one of the top 25 corporations on the Global 1000 list. e-System corporation expects to resell more than 100 of the Intrepid M appliances in the Japanese market over the next fiscal year.

Under terms of the agreement, e-System gains exclusive rights to resell Levanta's award-winning Linux management appliance in key Japanese markets. Levanta's Intrepid M -- as recently demonstrated at LinuxWorld Tokyo event -- is the first appliance that greatly simplifies common Linux systems management tasks for mid-market and enterprise customers, allowing reseller partners to enable their customers to tap into the tremendous cost savings of the Linux operating system, with no disruption to IT operations cost or control.

"The Linux user base in Japan is enormous, and organizations are specifically seeking new solutions that make it easy to manage their scale-out Linux server environments," said Hirofumi Watanabe, CEO of e-System Corporation. "As soon as e-System announced its original partnership with Levanta less than three months ago, we experienced a high volume of customer interest, and it became clear to us that the Intrepid M was going to be a big hit in the Japanese Linux market. e-System is thrilled to be the exclusive distributor in our region."

"Japan is a major international Linux market where users are very sophisticated and have high expectations of the gear they drop into their network," said Matt Mosman, CEO of Levanta. "So it's an honor to Levanta that our Linux management appliance has been greeted so enthusiastically by this market, and we're very excited to have a long and profitable ongoing relationship with e-System Corporation."

The latest partnership and support agreements with e-System Corporation continue the momentum of Levanta's expansion efforts in Asian channels. In December of 2005, Levanta announced the kickoff of an international sales program and a reseller agreement with NSTEK and Linuxkorea, two of Korea's largest Linux solution providers.