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Computerworld - NEW ORLEANS -- Steve Mills, senior vice president of IBM's Software Group, spoke with Computerworld last week about the software strategies of IBM and its top competitors.
How do you view the future of Unix at IBM? There are strong indications that the market is moving down the path to shift toward Linux. These things tend to be long-term trends. The existing Unixes are not just going to disappear from the planet. People started predicting the demise of NetWare 10-plus years ago. There's still lots of NetWare out there.
The more important issue is that Linux is following a fairly predictable path toward reaching maturity. As you look at the progression of Linux, at each level, this has become a more scalable product. Today, people are typically running two-ways and four-ways, but eight-way is certainly possible. If we look out to the end of the year, we're going to see a more significant number of people beginning to look at running seriously on eight-way and even pushing toward 16-way.

Steve Mills, senior vice president of IBM's Software Group

As we come around for another rev of Linux a couple of years out, Linux will be in the 16-, 24-way types of SMP systems. The larger class of multiprocessor systems are important to the commercial applications that businesses run today on Unix. Some of the richer application environments -- heavier-weight SAP or PeopleSoft -- are running on eight- and 16-way SMP systems.
People will begin [to say], "I think I'm going to choose Linux. I like the portability. I like the fact that I could start on a small Intel machine, I could move to a bigger RISC processor." We're natively supporting Linux on our pSeries processor today, along with the iSeries and the zSeries mainframes. That provides a lot of customer choice, and it's giving customers a sense of longevity to their existing Unix investments, because it's a very easy transition from an existing Unix system over to Linux.
Where is IBM's R&D money being invested for operating systems? Most of it goes to the mainframe still, for obvious reasons. Most of the world's business runs every day on the mainframe, and that's a life-and-death environment.
What do you think about Hewlett-Packard's strategy to focus exclusively on Intel architecture? Remember, HP was reaching a point -- this is going back to Lew Platt's tenure -- where they were having to think about what the long-term costs were going to be to design and fabricate high-performance microprocessors, which is not an inexpensive