Today at the LinuxCon conference, IBM announced that it is investing another billion dollars in Linux, but this time its aims are significantly more narrow than they were in 1999. Instead of investing in Linux as a whole, IBM PowerLinux IBM’s new investment is specifically targeted at Linux on IBM’s Power server architecture.
IBM’s Power Server architecture has been struggling in the marketplace. IBM’s first quarter results in April revealed that Power revenues were down by 31 percent. At the time, IBM CFO Mark Loughridge said that Linux would be the way forward for Power, and it’s a strategy that IBM has been rolling out ever since.