IBM Celebrates 20 Years of AIX Operating System Driving Innovation for the Number One UNIX Server Vendor

1 January 1970

Today IBM celebrates the 20th Anniversary of the AIX operating system and its role in leading IBM into the systems generation of computing. As IBM's strategic platform for UNIX innovation, AIX remains at the heart of IBM's ability to virtualize everything, commit to openness and collaborate to innovate. AIX has made extraordinary contributions to the UNIX community and continues its reputation with industry firsts and technology breakthroughs.

"We are pleased to celebrate 20 years of innovation on AIX and expect that the opening of the AIX Collaboration Center will continue AIX's leadership momentum in the marketplace," said Satya Sharma, IBM Distinguished Engineer and chief AIX architect "This milestone for AIX illustrates IBM's ongoing commitment to continue to lead the market and work with clients, partners, independent software vendors (ISVs) and the broader UNIX community to create innovative technologies."

Introduced in January, 1986, AIX was the catalyst for leading IBM into the world of open systems and standards such as UNIX, TCP/IP and the Ethernet. From 1990 to 1994, AIX brought operating system excellence to leading edge hardware technology. AIX expanded from a technical workstation platform to a true server operating system. Concurrently, IBM unveiled the POWER microprocessor architecture and combined with AIX, created the first RISC 6000 systems, or RS/6000 as they were later called. This breakthrough system platform was used to launch ibm.com and many other web sites.

From 1995 to 2000, AIX began to focus on commercial and technical application workloads, delivering symmetric multiprocessing and high end scalability. IBM's high performance computing leadership emerged from high availability systems such as Deep Blue and high powered clustered systems running AIX. With the release of AIX 5L in 2001, IBM began a period of major innovation in system partitioning. Logical partitioning, dynamic logical partitioning, and micropartitioning with virtualization were all enabled through AIX and delivered new levels of system flexibility and utilization.

Signaling it's ongoing commitment to AIX, IBM announced the opening of the AIX Collaboration Center (ACC) in December, 2005. Through a two-year, $200 million investment, IBM will use the center based in Austin, Texas to collaborate with customers, developers, ISVs, and academics to drive innovation around AIX technology; and to develop, test and adopt new applications and middleware for the AIX operating system.

The AIX Collaboration Center will focus on driving systems-level innovations around key technology areas like virtualization, security, performance and scalability, and will assist ISVs in advancing their applications on AIX by exploiting new IBM hardware and software capabilities. It will offer a wide range of resources including education, equipment, access to skilled technical consultants and remote or onsite testing capabilities to help enable their applications for AIX and the latest 64-bit POWER systems.

According to IDC, IBM has increased its UNIX revenue share to 31.8% and in Q205, was the number one UNIX server vendor based on revenue share, compared to Sun and HP. (1)

About IBM

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(1) IDC Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, 2Q05, issued on August 25, 2005

Contact:

Jill Holt

IBM Media Relations

p.914.766.4123

jolt@us.ibm.com

SOURCE: IBM

Source: marketwire

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