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


ARMONK, NY -- (MARKET WIRE) -- 01/20/06 -- 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


IBM is the world's largest information technology company, with 80
years of leadership in helping businesses innovate. Drawing on
resources from across IBM and IBM Business Partners, IBM offers a wide
range of services, solutions and technologies that enable customers,
large and small, to take full advantage of the new era of e-business.
For more information about IBM, visit http://www.ibm.com.


IBM is a trademark of IBM Corporation in the United States and/or
other countries. All other company/product names and service marks may
be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.
UNIX is a registered trademark in the United States and other
countries licensed exclusively through The Open Group.


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