IBM has announced that more than 600 independent software vendors (ISVs) and systems integrators have joined IBM's WebSphere Application Server (WAS) Community Edition partner initiative since it was launched just six months ago. WAS Community Edition is IBM's open source application server based on Apache Geronimo.

As a direct result of this initiative, more than 200 ISVs have developed and introduced new software applications that support WAS Community Edition, while more than 250,000 copies of WAS Community Edition have been downloaded.

The WAS Community Edition partner initiative is aimed at helping business partners reduce costs and grow revenue when supporting open source technologies. IBM assists partners with free sales, marketing and technical support to use WAS Community Edition to provide departmental and small- and medium-sized customers with an open source foundation for a service oriented architecture (SOA) that can scale to meet business needs. Based on core open source technology from the Apache Geronimo application server, WAS Community Edition and related subscription support services provide flexible and affordable infrastructure software to organizations that need a reliable alternative to traditional commercial software offerings.

"As an open source application server, WebSphere Application Server Community Edition fits perfectly into our business model," said David Richards, CEO of Centric CRM, a developer of enterprise class open source CRM software. "As an open source product backed by IBM, WAS Community Edition opens up new business opportunities for us. We have already closed business with a Fortune 500 company running Centric CRM on IBM's open standards middleware stack including WAS Community Edition."

"We've reached this milestone in just six months because customers are choosing WAS Community Edition to reduce open source integration costs while receiving world-class support from IBM," said Robert LeBlanc, general manager, IBM WebSphere. "The accelerating industry momentum behind WAS Community Edition represents customers of all sizes and industries."

WAS Community Edition, which is free to download and use, pre-integrates Apache Tomcat with several of the most commonly used open source components, such as web services, security, authentication, messaging and web tier clustering.

As part of this initiative, Business Partners have access to free, personalized WAS Community Edition technical enablement assistance, IBM Sales Connection, for instant access to WAS Community Edition sales specialists who can help them close deals faster; and lead generation packages.