linux user group brescia

sempre meglio...

SAP Venture Fund Makes Equity Investment in Red Hat Software, Inc.

 WALLDORF, Germany - March 30, 1999 - SAP AG (NYSE ADR: SAP), the
world's leading provider of
 enterprise business software solutions, today announced an equity
investment by the SAP Venture
 Fund in Red Hat Software, Inc., the leading commercial-grade supplier
of the Linux operating system.
 Linux is a stable, reliable and viable operating system developed
according to the Open Source model
 that has matured to the point where it is ready to run mission-critical
business applications.

 "The SAP Venture Fund is designed to foster innovative technology
developments that will have
 significant impact and benefits for SAP customers," said Howard Lau,
executive vice president of the
 SAP Venture Fund. "Linux is becoming a significant force in the
industry. We expect it to emerge as
 an attractive platform for enterprise computing, and Red Hat is a
leading Linux distributor."

 "Increasingly enterprise customers are looking for a Linux platform on
which to run their enterprise
 resource planning applications," said Robert F. Young, co-founder and
CEO of Red Hat Software. "We
 are pleased that SAP has selected Red Hat to support SAP and its
customers." More than 10 million
 users currently run the Linux operating system. Linux currently runs on
Intel X86, Compaq Alpha and
 Sun SPARC processors and will soon run on PowerPC and HP PA-RISC
systems.

 About SAP Venture Fund
 The purpose of the SAP Venture Fund is to provide funding to companies
with promising technologies
 that are expected to further the state of the art for enterprise
computing. The funding is by definition a
 venture investment and does not represent a commitment of further
business development initiatives by
 SAP.

 About Red Hat Software
 Founded in 1994, Red Hat Software is based in Research Triangle Park,
N.C., where it is a leader in
 the development of open source operating software solutions. Red Hat
Development builds the most
 accessible and advanced operating system available anywhere with
technical innovations such as
 RPM and the disk druid installation tool. Red Hat Linux is available
for Intel, Compaq Alpha, and Sun
 SPARC platforms.

 Red Hat Linux was named InfoWorld's Product of the Year for three years
in a row, was given a
 Productivity accolade in Software Development's Jolt Awards, was named
an Environment/Desktop
 finalist in the Ziff-Davis European Excellence Awards, won the editor's
choice awards from the Linux
 Journal and Australian Personal Computing magazines, and won the "Just
Plain Cool" award from
 Australian Personal Computing magazine.