India Broadband

India Broadband

IBM/Lotus is planning to launch the Notes client this month for the Linux platform. The launch is somewhat sooner than expected as the company continues to highlight their interest in this open source operating system platform.

The company had promised to add support for the Macintosh, Linux and Windows clients in its next release, which is codenamed Project Hannover. And being a heavy promoter of the Linux platform, IBM has worked hard on launching the Linux version.

IBM has said that they plan to launch Notes client for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Update 3 on July 24. A version for the Novell SUSE Linux Desktop for Enterprise 10 version would come out in the following months.

Market analysts believe that IBM is in a good position to leverage on the fact that Microsoft is late with their Vista operating system. By launching Notes for the Linux platform, they can further expand the usability of the Linux OS in the corporate environment.

Arthur Fontaine, senior offering manager for IBM spoke on this scheduled launch: “We said Hannover will have absolute equal Linux, Windows, Mac strategy, underlying that is our transition to rich eclipse platform under Notes. With this particular news, we still have native Windows and Mac version but have introduced an Eclipse rich platform-based version for the Linux client now.”