Gerstner: IBM To Place Billion-Dollar Bet Linux Could Overtake NT

IBM Chairman Louis Gerstner said his company is investing $1 billion in Linux as part of a bet that the open-source operating system could overtake Microsoft's Windows NT in 2004.

In a keynote speech at the eBusiness Expo here, Gerstner said Linux is growing at twice the rate of Windows NT. "Some estimate it will become more prevalent than NT by 2004," he said. "This is a big issue for every server company."

IBM is moving Linux into large commercial environments including a supercomputer-based cluster for Shell and a contract in Japan with a Linux network serving 15,000 users, Gerstner said.

The proprietary Unix systems being pushed by Sun Microsystems and others is the "last proprietary play you'll see in this industry for sometime to come," said Gerstner.

"We are convinced Linux can do for business applications what the Internet did for networking and communications," said Gerstner.

If companies are going to be successful in the next generation of eBusiness, they must invest in an infrastructure that is "open and based on cross-industry standards" such as Linux, Gerstner said. The fight for open standards is "worth fighting" and solution providers and businesses should not settle for proprietary systems, he said.