In today's highly competitive Internet marketplace, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are struggling to distinguish themselves from their competitors by offering value-added services to their customers above and beyond simple connections to the Internet. These services include branded portals, B2B and B2C e-commerce solutions, managed applications, and hosting services, as well as others. ISPs redefining themselves in this way are generically referred to as eXtended Service Providers (XSPs), where "X" stands for any number of possible services or offerings.

The fastest growing Internet platform today for these value-added services is built around the Linux operating system, the Apache Web server, the Sendmail e-mail server, and a number of other open source Internet technologies running on a variety of hardware platforms. Unfortunately, most XSPs today still lack the expertise to provide and manage open source software for their customers and thus, a lucrative market remains untapped.

Here's where Linuxcare comes into the picture. For a monthly subscription fee (tailored to the number of servers supported), Linuxcare provides XSPs with a total provisioning and management program for delivering open source software that can be seamlessly integrated into their current services. This program is called Linuxcare Managed Services. Enabled by Linuxcare's unparalleled software and management experts, Linuxcare Managed Services lets XSPs deploy open-source platforms optimized and certified by Linuxcare Labs, which are then managed remotely 24x7x365 by Linuxcare. The service can be fully branded by the XSP, or co-branded with Linuxcare.