IBM fights back with hardware, Dec 23, 2004

In 2000, Mr Palmisano mapped out a strategy calling on IBM to share technologies more effectively across its hardware line-up, to embrace Linux and other products of the open source software community, and to start building tools to help companies manage increasingly complex IT systems. The project was known as Mach One.

IBM has published a "Redbook" aimed at assisting those interested in migrating desktop PCs to Linux.

Attempting to regain the ground it ceded to Microsoft and Intel with the growth of Windows in the 1990s, IBM has released a low-end server designed expressly to run Linux.

Red Hat and IBM will jointly help software vendors certify their applications for Linux in a partnership announced today.

IBM has signed a deal to provide training in Linux and open-source software to 980 employees in the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo, the company said Monday.

IBM may not want to get into a "religious war" over the Linux desktop but given how much Microsoft has got to lose this is not going to be a fight they can stay out for much longer.

Open-source platforms are becoming more popular in the South American market. Already governments in Brazil and Venezuela have opted to incorporate Linux as their preferred operating system.

Senior IBM executives claim a few key government departments will drive the momentum around Linux on the client

IBM stepped up its assault on the desktop software market with the introduction of new bundles of its Workplace software that are designed for medium-size businesses and for specific industries.

Big Blue is following its supercomputing success with Blue Gene/L by adding a Blue Gene model to its server range, with prices starting at a mere $1.5m

IBM Corp. and Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) have won contracts to supply Linux-based supercomputers to a Korean national university and a Japanese nuclear research institute, the two companies said Thursday.

International Business Machines presented the Spanish government on Friday with what it called the most powerful computer in Europe, saying it would open a new era in scientific research in Spain.

Iams said IBM was taking the correct approach with centers like the one in Beijing, as it represents a way to tap into emerging markets where open source has taken root much faster than in North American markets.

IBM has expanded the top end of its eServer range with three multiple-processor systems aimed at datacentres and large enterprise clients.

IBM today laid out a new road map for its mainframe computing platform, which over the next year will include adoption of the Common Information Model (CIM) standard allowing different systems to exchange information.

IBM has partnered with a computing organization and an educational institution in India to promote the development of open-source software in the region, the company said Thursday.

IBM Corp has ported its Middleware Industry Solutions for government, banking and retail to the Linux operating system, responding it said to high rates of adoption in those vertical markets.

The EPA is using Linux and IBM supercomputers on a grid to carry out improved air quality modeling as well as to better predict the environmental risks of exposure to air pollution, an agency spokesman said.

"We think this open systems approach by IBM will give some added speed and better efficiencies focused on improving the nation's health by partnering with states in their implementation of new clean air standards," said Dr. Paul Gilman, assistant administrator for the EPA's research and development group.

IBM plans to announce Monday that it will contribute some of its speech-recognition software to two open-source software groups.

The move is a tactical step by IBM to accelerate the development of speech applications and to outmaneuver rivals, especially Microsoft, in a market that is expected to grow rapidly in the next few years with increased use in customer-service call centers, cars and elsewhere. To do this, IBM is again using the strategy of placing some of its proprietary software in open-source projects, making it available for other programmers to improve.

International Business Machines Corp on Sunday announced a new computer server using its Power5 microprocessor tuned for the popular Linux operating system, as the No. 1 computer maker aims to broaden the adoption of Linux in broader corporate computing markets.

Open-source geeks are devout in their belief that software should be free to all, and hold as their icon the Linux alternative to the Microsoft commercial empire. As unpaid volunteers who collaborate to develop open source code, they tend to be anti-corporate types. So they watched with some trepidation as a capitalist giant, IBM, began pouring money into Linux, capped by a $1 billion investment in 2001. Yet in the past year, the corporation known as Big Blue has seen its reputation in the global open-source community shift from suspect sugar daddy to knight in shining armor.

International Business Machines Corp. late on Wednesday rolled out a new version of its database software aimed at users of Linux and Unix operating systems that it hopes will help the company take away market share from market leader Oracle Corp.

IBM said the latest version of its DB2 software that runs on Linux and Unix automatically self-manages databases, allowing companies to better manage, process and retrieve data such as product pricing.

IBM Corp. will spend more than $1 million to help fund a Linux technology center in Brazil. The center, created in conjunction with the Brazilian government, aims to train 700 public service professionals on the use of Linux by year's end.

IBM and Intel plan to open up their eServer blade platform to seed the market for future designs, the companies plan to announce Thursday.

IBM officials positioned the move as one that was necessary to grow the market from the "early adopter" phase to the "mass adopter" phase. With the specifications—which Intel Corp. and IBM plan to provide royalty-free—customers can design their own platforms around IBM's blades, executives said.

Seeking to win over Java coders working on Linux, IBM is making its Java Runtime Environment (JRE) for Linux available as a free download on its developerWorks Web site. Java developers can also download the latest version of the open-source Eclipse SDK from the same site.

'This makes it easier for developers to work with Eclipse,' says Gina Poole, IBM vice president developer marketing and Web communities for ISV and developer relations. 'In the past, Java developers would have to download Eclipse from Eclipse.org and then go to Sun and download the Java runtime environment. We're making it easier for them by putting both together.'

IBM has delivered a significant boost to the fast-fading Unix computing space, with the launch of its eServer p5 -- an advanced line of Unix and Linux servers using Big Blue’s 64-bit Power5 microprocessors and micro-partitioning technology.

IBM’s open-sourcing of its Cloudscape database announced earlier this month points to a deeper strategy to gain control of the middleware space at Microsoft’s expense.

Cloudscape is a 2MB embeddable full-functioned relational database which does not require a database administrator to manage. It was acquired along with IBM’s billion-dollar buyout of Informix in 2001.

Now IBM has handed over “Derby”, a copy of Cloudscape, to the Apache Software Foundation to build a community of users around it, and in the process make Cloudscape the de facto standard for embedded databases.

IBM is offering at no charge to mail its Linux Software Evaluation Kit DVD set to those who wish to obtain the latest of its middleware that has been ported to Linux - including WebSphere Studio application Developer v5.1.2, DB2 Universal Database v8.1.6, Tivoli Access Manager v5.1, and Tivoli Directory Server v5.2.

In another sign the mainframe computer is coming back to life, IBM plans to announce on Wednesday that a customer is using its zSeries machines and Linux for a major consolidation of business applications.

Endress+Hauser, which makes measuring devices for industrial process engineering, is migrating its 19 SAP applications into one primary data center in Germany using two z990 mainframes, according to IBM. With a total of 36 processors running the Linux operating system, the setup is one of Europe's largest installations of Linux on the mainframe, IBM said.

Selling servers is IBM's biggest Linux business, with nearly $2 billion in sales expected in 2004, but the company says services and software revenue will grow in coming years.

"The services business is growing much faster than we ever thought," doubling annually, said Jim Stallings, IBM's Linux general manager, in an interview at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo. "Services is growing faster than servers, and middleware is growing faster than servers."

In his keynote address on Wednesday at LinuxWorld, IBM Senior Vice President of Technology and Marketing Nick Donofrio assured the Linux nation his company would not assert its formidable patent portfolio against the Linux kernel and strongly advocated others to promise the same.

Donofrio's remarks were in response to a statement earlier this week from the Open Source Risk Management organization based on its research and initial analysis of patents that might affect the Linux kernel. A number of those patents were identified as being owned by several larger companies with strategic Linux-based strategies including IBM.

International Business Machines says it has been selected to build a supercomputer for the U.S. Department of Defence that help develop advanced weapons for the army.

The computer, code named "Stryker", will be deployed at the Army Research Laboratory Major Shared Resource Centre in Aberdeen, Maryland, IBM said on Tuesday.

IBM did not disclose the financial terms of the deal.

The supercomputer consists of 1,186 powerful IBM computers connected together with a total of about 2,300 64-bit microprocessors made by AMD. The supercomputer would run on the Linux operating system.

Targeting emerging markets where demand for its technologies is growing the fastest, IBM this month combined several initiatives, including Linux, grid computing and virtualization, to form a high-growth business group called Strategic Growth Initiatives.

"The opportunity here is that customers are asking for gridded Linux networks and virtualized servers that can run multiple operating systems," said Jim Stallings, general manager of the new group, in an interview. "The big news here is the customer thirst for this."

IBM is one of the strongest advocates of the Linux, and has invested billions of dollars to ensure its systems support the open-source operating system.

In the mainframe world, IBM has shown the potential of Linux as a system fit enough for the toughest corporate task, while Linux has provided 'big iron' with some much-needed street-cred.

As worldwide vice president of Linux sales, Carol Stafford is charged with the task of spreading the word of Linux to IBM's biggest customers.

IBM is to collaborate with educators to teach students open standards skills.

The IBM Academic Initiative will work with schools that support open standards and seek to use open source and IBM technologies for teaching purposes, both directly and through the web. Standards such as Java, Linux, and Eclipse are part of the effort, as well as training on IBM software and servers.

IBM today announced a new line of Power5 Unix and Linux servers that will give users a mainframelike ability to virtualize their systems at the processor level -- a capability some users, including Whirlpool Corp., are hoping will reduce their software and hardware costs.

In his first 18 months as general manager of IBM's worldwide Linux team, Jim Stallings has seen dozens of corporate shops and governments around the world push Linux from the periphery to the heart of their IT strategies -- never a bad thing for job security when you have the word "Linux" in your title. But with the open source operating system now more firmly entrenched, the next challenge for Stallings and his team is to help Linux drive IBM's companywide On Demand initiative deeper into corporate accounts with one hand while fighting the ongoing server battle against Windows with the other.

IBM is taking its love of Linux to South America, introducing consulting services to promote the open-source operating system in Brazil.

IBM's Global Services division on Monday detailed the services it is offering corporations in Brazil that are interested in using Linux on desktop PCs, point-of-sale terminals and other devices. The strategy is part of IBM's larger push to sell Linux-based hardware and services to compete against Microsoft.

Open Client Desktop services will be sold to companies in the retail, financial and government industries. IBM earlier this year realigned its software and services organizations to sell to corporations along industry lines.

On the eve of the one-year anniversary of its Express line of server-based applications, IBM on Monday said it is shipping a Linux-based version of Content Manager Express to beta testers and also touted plans to deliver the product on its iSeries platform shortly, with both the Linux and iSeries versions intended for midsize companies.

Company officials claim the beta delivery of Content Manager Express marks the first Linux-based offering for content management sculpted specifically for the midsize markets. They believe the offering will give cash-strapped IT shops a way to adopt a much lower cost solution for managing lots of unstructured data.

With the workstation class of laptops carrying strong margins, the companies hope their Linux-based IBM T42-series laptop on steroids will appeal to the engineering community, Rob Enderle writes.

The dynamic duo of IBM and PeopleSoft has launched an initiative that the two companies say will expand their existing alliance, allowing them to focus more sharply on small and mid-size businesses (SMBs) worldwide. The alliance calls for joint hardware and software development of vertical applications, joint marketing efforts, cooperative Linux development and industry-specific solutions for resellers.

On Monday, IBM announced it was launching a Web-based software suite that would offer Microsoft Office-like applications. But unlike Microsoft's Office, IBM's Lotus Workplace software is designed to be used over the Internet and is accessible from systems running Windows, Mac, Linux, Unix as well as handheld devices.

Ian Wesley, IBM research director at Ovum, said that the new software is a way for IBM to offer its existing Lotus customers an upgrade path and is not a direct attack on Microsoft's Office suite.

Big Blue is migrating some its internal applications to Linux but is taking its time, according to an IBM executive speaking at the Linux User and Developer show in London

IBM isn't rushing all of its staff onto open-source software but is embracing Linux in places where it provides genuine business benefits, the company said this week.

Nick Donofrio, IBM senior vice president, technology and manufacturing noted that IBM's involvement and promotion of open source operating system Linux has been very positive and the company now hopes to extend that kind of growth and developer interest to its Power microprocessors.

Donofrio said that individual computer chip and system suppliers have relied on different microprocessor architectures and features to advance their products over the competition's offerings. But IBM believes closed-source chip design has slowed innovation since users have had to wait for the chip producers to make changes in microprocessor architecture or design.

Greenpeace UK has aging Novell Inc. servers and is putting them out to grass to bring in a storage network from IBM Corp. business partner Ardenta. There will be 100 Greenpeace staff using the 2TB SAN with IBM FASt600 storage.

The SAN will replace two NetWare servers and sits behind an existing infrastructure of Linux and Microsoft Windows 2000-based servers.

All parties involved are congratulating each other about this. "This is an excellent example of a high resilience storage implementation, recognizing that organizations of all sizes, large and small, need the very best protection for their vital data," stated Shaun Coulson, IBM Storage business director, U.K.

IBM hopes to have 40,000 Linux desktop users within the company by the end of the year, said an IBM executive at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco.

About 15,000 of IBM's 300,000 employees have moved to the Linux desktop, said Scott Handy, IBM's vice-president of worldwide Linux strategy and market development.

Online music store Napster announced this week a new cache-management technology that uses Linux , open standards and IBM services to provide its music service for universities, ISPs and businesses without impacting bandwidth or introducing security threats.

The application, dubbed "Super Peer," will use IBM eServer BladeCenter systems running Linux with IBM services to cache Napster content in on-site servers managed by Napster. The service will be made available to institutions such as Penn State University and the University of Rochester, which currently provide Napster to those on campus through agreements with the company.

IBM Corp. plans to invest $1 billion this year to help developers create programs for specific industries, in a bid to take market share from Microsoft Corp.

IBM, the second-largest software maker, will help sell the new programs and provide companies with technical assistance, including free development tools, the Armonk, N.Y.-based company said yesterday. The software will be geared toward small to medium-size companies with fewer than 1,000 employees.

The investment steps up competition between Microsoft and IBM for small and medium-sized customers. IBM also has spent $1 billion to make its hardware and software work with the Linux operating system as a low-cost alternative to Microsoft's Windows.

The company will install a second Blue Gene supercomputer at a radio telescope project in the Netherlands

IBM will install a second Blue Gene/L supercomputer as part of a radio telescope project in the Netherlands, the company plans to announce on Monday.

IBM Corp. researchers are bringing text-to-speech capabilities to the Linux desktop.

Previously, production versions of IBM’s text-to-speech engine had been available only for the Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh platforms, said Rich Schwerdtfeger, an IBM software group accessibility strategist and chairman of IBM’s Accessibility Architecture Review Board.

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