“InformationWeek: To date, you’ve introduced
Linux on servers, notebook PCs, and mainframes. Why is Linux so
important to IBM?
Irving Wladawsky-Berger: For us, it’s an
inflection point that’s associated with our focus on creating
E-business solutions. We’re helping companies build content
solutions, commerce solutions, operations solutions-and Linux is a
standard that we can use to help integrate all of these. It makes
it much easier to move application components around. As a company,
we’re very sensitive to what it takes to achieve integration,
because we’re not just focused on selling this or that hardware
platform. Linux will become the application development platform of
choice for developers because of its multiplatform nature, and
because it’s not owned by any vendor. As a result of that, you can
have vendors collaborating on standards.”
“InformationWeek: Does all this mean that
Linux will eventually replace AIX, IBM’s version of Unix?
Wladawsky-Berger: AIX continues to be our
industrial-strength Unix operating system, and it always-well, for
the foreseeable future at least-will be one or two steps ahead of
Linux in maturity and ability. But we would like to make sure
that Linux is part of an integrated Unix family, and the way we’re
trying to do that is to make sure that Linux applications can run
seamlessly on AIX through the investment we’re making in developing
a Linux operating environment for AIX. But when you get to the
larger symmetric multiprocessors and more mission-critical apps, it
will be some time before Linux can handle this.”