IBM and Sun Microsystems yesterday intensified competition in an already crowded operating systems market with an agreement to co-operate on distributing Sun's Solaris operating software on IBM's PowerPC platform.
The deal represents a big shot in the arm for Sun's software subsidiary, SunSoft, which has struggled with mixed success to sell Solaris as a platform standard.
While Solaris has been successful in niche technical workstation markets, the new arrangement with IBM puts Solaris on what is expected to eventually become a mass-market platform to rival Intel's x86 environment.
Specifically, the two companies - which compete ferociously in the UNIX workstation market - will co-operate in porting the Solaris operating system to the PowerPC platform, and will allow IBM to distribute Solaris on PowerPC machines under an original equipment manufacturer agreement.
An IBM spokesman said the company would distribute the operating system either pre-loaded on sales of PowerPC systems, or on CD-ROM. The technical modifications to Solaris that optimise it for the PowerPC will be completed by both companies. The system will be available in the first half of next year.
''We have all along intended to have a lot of different environments available on the PowerPC platform, so this is another piece that has fallen into place,'' said Lai Yee-chong, IBM's PowerPC product manager.
IBM has said its PowerPC products will run AIX applications (AIX is IBM implementation of UNIX), Windows, DOS, Macintosh and OS/2 programs. It will later include Windows NT from Microsoft, and Taligent, its joint-development project with Apple aiming to design a new operating system.