IBM's Cognos subsidiary announced on Monday that Cognos 8 business-intelligence software will be available on the IBM System z mainframe running Linux.
Until now, the software has mainly been targeted at low- and mid-range servers, including Unix and Linux systems.
In the announcement, the company said that making its business intelligence (BI) for Linux software available on the mainframe would help customers to "efficiently report and analyse transactional systems directly on the mainframe, so workers across an organisation can use information to quickly identify and respond to critical business trends".
According to Cognos's vice president of BI product marketing, Leah MacMillan, the release will let customers "take advantage of [Cognos's] broad range of proven BI capabilities for all types of users across the organisation, to optimise operational processes, while reducing infrastructure cost and complexity".
The IBM System z is enjoying something of a resurgence, thanks to a move by many companies towards consolidation of their IT infrastructure. As a result of its large processing capacity, the System z is seen as a good consolidation tool. Gartner recently highlighted System z as one of the reasons why IBM was doing especially well commercially this year.
More than 600 new applications were introduced for the IBM mainframe in 2007, according to an IBM statement, "bringing the total to more than 4,000 unique applications available on the System z platform".
IBM announced plans to purchase Cognos for US$5bn (£2.5bn) in November last year; the sale was finalised in January.
