Collax Inc, the year-old German turnkey Linux server start-up with $8.5 million in first-round and a desire to compete against Microsoft, is moving its headquarters from Munich to Bedford, Massachusetts in the US. The company has a simiplified Linux Business Server  that can be sold as an appliance meant for SMB markets that it believes is currently dominated by Microsoft. There is no real Linux competitor in the sector, it says.

It also sells an Open-Xchange server from the same open source source as Novell.

One of Collax' co-founders is Boris Nalbach, who was CTO of SUSE around the time Novell bought it and made him VP of its open source software strategy for a while. Nalbach, who is Collax' CTO too, together with CEO Olaf Jacobi and CFO William Hite started the company, and the money that they got in February comes from Intel Capital, Atlas Venture Partners and Wellington Partners. The intention is to push the kit through the channel. In Europe 80% of Collax' resellers have been Microsoft resellers. It has been selling the software bundled on white boxes made for it in Germany by Pyramid. It is may do the same kind of thing in the America market.

Linux of course comes bundled with an overwhelming welter of software that most SMBs don't need, so Collax plans to offer what it thinks companies and departments of larger enterprises need. (It offers some 230 best-of-breed packages as opposed to 1,500 or more, for example.) The Collax Business Server includes applications for security, networking and communication, everything needed to run a business on.

It claims that its server can be used with any Windows, Mac or Linux client devices with no knowledge of Linux required, or administration, or learning a new operating system for that matter.

Apparently the stack can be customized and it's got what Collax calls an easy-to-use GUI for installation, updates and maintenance. It hides the complexity.

It's available as a free software license for up to five non-commercial users, and can scale for use in small to medium-sized businesses and distributed branch offices of large enterprises. The American price list hasn't been established yet but in Europe a system for 25 users runs 665 euros a year. Like other open source players it charges for upgrades and maintenance.

Now at 30 strong, Collax means to be up and running by the end of summer and have 12-15 people in place in the Boston area by the end of the year. The company currently claims 6,000 customers including Bayer and the city of Bonn. (Its server can scale and it has one site, Jacobi says, with 3,000 users, but that's something of an abberation. Collax' stock-in-trade is 10-250 users.)

Jacobi was previously with Cobion AG as an investor and board member. Cobion was sold to Internet Secuiryt Systems Inc in 2004. Hite has a back ground in acquisitions and took ON Technology public. The team also includes erstwhile UnitedLinux boss and OSDL business development exec Paula Hunter as vice president of US marketing.

(This story was originally published in Client Server News.)