IBM Announces Plan to Invest $1B into Linux at LinuxCon Keynote in New Orleans

IBMThis morning (September 17), LinuxCon Keynote Brad McCredie, VP and IBM Fellow, Systems and Technology Group Chief Technology Officer at IBM announced a significant investment into the operating system Linux.

Over the next five years, IBM will invest $1 billion in new Linux and open source technologies for IBM’s Power Systems servers.

Today’s growth areas include virtualization and cloud data. The initiatives are focused on expanding IBM’s growing ecosystem for Power Systems and Linux, which represents more than 2,500 open source applications worldwide.

McCredie said it’s a pretty exciting change in the industry. “Linux is not just another OS,” he continued.

The investment on Linux and Power Systems will be applied to product research, design and development, and will find a variety of ecosystem skills and product enablement programs for clients, developers, business partners, entrepreneurs, academics and students.

“…There also are likely to be other investments that IBM is making that do benefit the larger Linux community. For example, any work IBM does to increase the performance or scale of the base Linux operating system likely benefits all Linux users,” said Al Gillen, program vice president for system software research at IDC.