IBM Launches AIX Collaboration Center

Published: January 12, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

With Sun Microsystems having made a lot of headlines in 2005 for the delivery of Solaris 10 and then the open sourcing of that platform with the creation of the OpenSolaris project, both IBM and Hewlett-Packard have been, by comparison, pretty quiet on the Unix front. And, with both vendors having long since adopted a multi-platform strategy when it comes to operating systems, compared to Sun's nearly total devotion to Solaris, it behooves both IBM and HP to spend a little money and effort building up their Unixes.

This is why Big Blue has announced a two-year, $200 million effort to focus on AIX development and to create the AIX Collaboration Center in its Austin, Texas, facilities. The Austin facilities are where IBM has done the bulk of AIX development in the past decade and a half, and it is also where some of the Power processor and system interconnection technologies embodied in the pSeries and iSeries product lines were developed.

The AIX Collaboration Center, which you can reach by clicking here, will be managed by Satya Sharma, the chief architect for the AIX operating system and a distinguished engineer at IBM. The center is a facility where IBM experts, customers, developers, software vendors, and academic institutions can come together to drive innovation in the AIX software platform and help push requirements in the related Power server platforms. IBM's Research, Global Services, Software Group, and Systems and Technology Group will all have a hand in the center. Database and application software maker Oracle is the first ISV to become a member of the collaboration center. But Oracle is coding in Solaris and is using Sparc boxes internally, so this is nothing more than Oracle needing to cover its bases, particularly with IBM accounting for most of the growth in the Unix market last year. Symantec, by virtue of the Veritas file system, and SAS Institute, with its Unix-based data analytics business, have also joined.

What IBM does not want to talk about is the more than 3.5 million downloads of Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris that Sun has attained in a year, and the mindshare momentum that Sun is getting from taking its entire software stack open source. This is, of course, something that IBM might have some difficulties doing right now, even if it wanted to, because of the lawsuit between itself and SCO Group. Sun has a license to Unix that allowed it to take Solaris open source; it is unclear exactly what IBM is allowed to do with its Unix license. But if open source can drive Linux and Solaris, it can drive AIX, too, which is a fine operating system. If IBM were smart and truly serious about AIX over the very long haul, it would settle up with SCO for a few pennies on the dollars that SCO is asking, take AIX open source, and get into the fight with Sun proper. HP would be wise to take HP-UX open source, too, and SCO could do the same with its unified OpenServer-UnixWare platform. By doing so, customers would no longer have to question the long-term viability of or the vendor commitment to any Unix platform. In a pinch, the various Unix communities could just support any given Unix themselves.