By Siobhan Kennedy Craig Barrett, Intel’s chairman and CEO yesterday hinted that his company might make new investments in Linux distributors within the course of the next twelve months. The company has already made an investment in the leading Linux distributor, Red Hat, along with both VA Linux (which filed for an IPO last week) […]
By Siobhan Kennedy
Craig Barrett, Intel’s chairman and CEO yesterday hinted that his company might make new investments in Linux distributors within the course of the next twelve months. The company has already made an investment in the leading Linux distributor, Red Hat, along with both VA Linux (which filed for an IPO last week) and TurboLinux, formerly known as Pacific HiTech.
But yesterday, during a press conference at the Gartner Group’s Symposium Itxpo, Barrett implied more funding could be in the pipeline. We’ll invest in anything that promotes technology for the use of computers, he said. Linux is increasingly popular with the ISPs so there’s an obvious match there. Why not make investments in the odd Linux start-up or two?
Earlier during a question and answer session with Gartner analyst David Smith, Barrett said he thought there would be a big opportunity for IA-64 in the Linux space. As IA-64 becomes successful as part of the basic engine that drives the e-commerce revolution, we expect to see a huge growth on Linux which is big on those ISP platforms, he said. But we’re not handpicking. We see intense competition on all platforms.
But time and time again, the analyst pushed Barrett on Intel’s relationship with Linux, as if he knew of an upcoming announcement and was trying to make Barrett divulge the details. But the CEO would not be budged. He did, however, say that Intel has traditionally been an NT shop but added that could change in the future depending on the reliability and scalability [of Linux]. Barrett said that Intel’s commitment to Linux was driven by end users’ preference for the platform. While he declined to say that Intel would offer Linux any particular support over other platforms, the inference was that the chip giant. He added: My gut feeling this year is that we’ll make a couple of hundred investments, not just Linux. At the moment, we spend about $100m but I expect that will reach about $1bn.
