"We have a very, very strong belief that open source and standards are absolutely critical foundation for the IT businesses of the future and as a result of that they are a very critical foundation for IBM," Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM vice president, technology and strategy, said.
"At IBM we are comitted to embrace Linux across everything we do...because Linux is the only operating system that you can safely say will run on architecture that has not yet been invented," he added.
Wladawsky-Berger pins his claims that Linux is the fastest growing operating system on research conducted by IDC and he says there are four key marketplaces that have embraced Linux, the first being the world of consolidation.
"One of the capabilities of Linux is that it makes it very easy to distribute and consolidate into larger servers," he said. For example, Korean Airlines recently made the decision to consolidate some of its major distributor applications, such as those that assign pilot schedules, into IBM's zseries suite of servers. Web sites that pilots access to find out when they're flying all now run through Linux, according to Wladawsky-Berger .
Linux also is surperb in clusters, such as the big supercomputing clusters used in Universities and research laboratories, Wladawsky-Berger said. "In Linux clusters we have a growing number of customers," he said, pointing to Shell which is already doing very powerful analyses on Linux clusters. Also, just last week, the National Science Foundation combined the power of four supercomputers placed at different locations with linked clusters. "The combined power of the supercomputers is 13.5 terraflops," Wladawsky-Berger said. "That's a lot of terraflops."
Another marketplace keen top adopt Linux is the world of distributed enterprise, and Australian car rental company Thrify is an example of a company cutting costs by installing Linux-based servers, Wladawsky-Bergern said. The fourth marketplace is the world of appliances. "The number of customers here is growing as more and more applications are coming to light," he added.
Although the core Linux applications are currenlty in the Internet space, IBM anticipates a move to more enterprise applications and to facilitate that, there is a lot of work within IBM to help Linux move into the enterprise arena, according to Wladawsky-Berger.
"Linux is permeating just about everything we do," he said. "I'm very glad to say that the number of applications supported by Linux that we are working with keep growing...we have a very good base to build on and that base will continue to grow."
"We really see a continuing very positive picture of the whole IT industry, we think technology will keep advancing at a very rapid pace, we see the integration of that technology bringing us all kinds of new capabilities and we very much see a very a very strong role for Linux and for open source software in general," Wladawsky-Berger said.
Rachel Lebihan travelled to San Franscisco as a guest of IBM.
Linux is ultra cool
If you want to change something just go to the code. Try that with windows.