Penguin in a blue suit: Linux on the corporate mainframe

Ninety-nine per cent of electronic transactions take place on Linux. What a load of nonsense, you might say. Well, right here, in May 2000 you'd be right, but come this time in 2003, that statistic might not seem so ridiculous.

The biggest IT users in the world - banks, oil companies, insurance giants - have so far been pretty wary of open source in general, and Linux in particular. For starters, they've seen it as the preserve of a particularly hairy sector of the developer community, and therefore cannot possibly be suitable for real business. Second, it runs primarily on mid-range servers - great for Web-hosting, not so great for bulk transaction processing.

But that could change very soon, because the suits at IBM have bowed to the ever-increasing demand for a Linux port to the S/390 mainframe.

It all began when the Microsoft-IBM love-hate relationship forgot the love side of the equation, prompting Lou Gerstner to take a look around for just about any way possible to hurt Mr Gates.

At around the same time, Linux began to emerge from the open source bunker into the mainstream, giving the Armonk crowd a perfect tool for smashing Windows.

So IBM's legions of developers potentially became the open-source movement's best friends, porting Linux to just about every platform possible. The one major problem was how to get it onto 'top-of-the-range' mission-critical machines like the S/390, because without that, Linux would never be blue chip.

But according to this week's announcement, it seems they've done it. S/390s running Linux natively is a reality, and crucially so are IBM-endorsed service and support offerings.

Now Linux has further credibility in the corporate back office. The large-scale integration of bulk transaction processing with the Internet and ebusiness seems possible.

It doesn't seem quite so unlikely that NatWest - to randomly pick a prime NT site as an example - would run Linux on all its mainframes does it?