Wednesday, 14 February 2007

IBM Offers New Open Client Solution for Enterprise PCs

IBM has unveiled a new Open Client Solution for customers of any size or industry so they can help their employees better collaborate, improve productivity, and lower the total cost of information technology ownership, the company is said to have stated...

IBM has unveiled a new Open Client Solution for customers of any size or industry so they can help their employees better collaborate, improve productivity, and lower the total cost of information technology ownership, the company is said to have stated.

IBM developed the new solution based on best practices it learned from an IBM internal desktop deployment, which supports open standards, and includes Lotus collaboration software products running on Red Hat's Enterprise Linux Workstation. One of the largest corporate Linux desktop roll-outs to date, the Open Client Solution complements the company's broad roles-based strategy which is aimed at providing employees the right platform for an individual's specific job role, IBM representatives said.

Further advancing the company's open standards push beyond Linux, customers will be afforded the freedom to choose from a variety of IBM technologies or Business Partner applications including: IBM Productivity tools that support the OASIS Open Document Format ( ODF ), the Firefox Web browser, Lotus Notes & Lotus Domino, Lotus Sametime and IBM WebSphere Portal v6 on Red Hat Desktop Linux suite, or SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, the company said.

According to IBM, customers can choose to run both Linux and Windows on PCs and include social collaboration products from Lotus. The Lotus Notes and Lotus Sametime collaboration and instant messaging products were the first two mass-marketed enterprise products to be delivered for Linux-based PCs. Lotus Notes 8 is currently scheduled to support Macintosh later this year.

"Our goal is to provide a flexible open client platform that minimises customer investment needs and gives users the option to choose the tools they need to do their jobs more efficiently," said Scott Handy, vice president, Worldwide Linux and Open Source, IBM. "Increasingly, customers are asking for software and tools that are based on open standards that easily integrate within existing open IT environments, and have enterprise-level security features. "We've addressed this market demand by creating an open solution that runs on multiple operating systems with components supported by services from IBM, Red Hat and Novell."

The solution is currently available worldwide and is priced based on customer requirements.