rPath, provider of the first platform for creating and maintaining virtual and software appliances, today announced the availability of rBuilder 3.0 and the rPath Appliance Platform. rPath now provides software vendors complete appliance lifecycle management -- from creation to deployment to configuration to maintenance. Together, rBuilder and the rPath Appliance Platform give software vendors a solution that simplifies software and drives revenue growth.

A software appliance is an application combined with a purpose-built operating system that readily installs on industry standard hardware or in a virtualized environment. Software appliances offer an unprecedented opportunity for application providers to expand the market for their software by making it more accessible to potential buyers. Simple software is easier to sell, enabling the ISV to enter markets and open channels of distribution that were previously unavailable to them.

“The emergence of software appliances creates new go-to-market opportunities for application software vendors, and this form factor has the potential to lower deployment and long term management costs for end users,” said Al Gillen, research vice president of system software for IDC. “A confluence of market trends including increasingly broad adoption of virtualization solutions and the emergence of software appliance tool vendors will help boost the acceptance of software appliances."

Simplify the Software Appliance Lifecycle
rBuilder 3.0 and the rPath Appliance Platform offer new features that make full lifecycle management of appliances easy and powerful:

• Virtualization Support -- Software vendors have the choice of having their final appliance run on any of the leading virtualization formats, including VMware, Xen, Microsoft, Parallels and Virtual Iron.
• Update Service -- Customers can retrieve, apply or rollback updates to the software appliance via a simple web interface. Complete appliance upgrades can be done in a fail-safe manner enabling the customer to move the appliance version forward with confidence.
• Entitlement Service -- Vendors can use the entitlement service to quickly and easily provision and manage licenses, enabling “try before you buy” offers and piracy protection.
• Backup Service -- Appliances can be automatically backed up on a scheduled basis to a SAN, NAS, Windows or Linux fileserver.
• Configuration Service -- Customers can configure the software appliance without any specialized technology skills using a simple web-based management console.
• Linux Service -- rPath provides regular updates, improvements and security upgrades to the Linux system components included in the appliances.

“The legacy approach of customers integrating and maintaining software components is going to be replaced by software appliances,” said Billy Marshall, CEO of rPath. “When the application vendors simplify their products and take responsibility for the customer experience, they will see their license revenue begin to grow again as more customers are able to embrace their product.”

Availability
rBuilder 3.0 and the rPath Appliance Platform are available today. rBuilder 3.0 is also available as a community service at rBuilder Online for those developers delivering freely available applications. For more information about rBuilder 3.0 and the rPath Appliance Platform, please visit http://www.rpath.com .

About rPath
rBuilder and rPath Appliance Platform transform applications into software appliances. Software appliances simplify server applications by eliminating the hassles of installation, configuration, and maintenance. Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) can expand their markets and simultaneously reduce development and support costs by adopting the software appliance approach. rPath is also the first and only company to automate support for all the major virtualization formats. The company is headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina. For more information, visit http://www.rpath.com .