“At IBM, we believe in partnering to help bring real solutions to the market place that add customer value, real business value. We also take great pride in being leaders in delivering technology that helps accelerate the time to value for the customers, lowering TCO, helping them get up and running more quickly. We saw DB2 on Opteron as a compelling platform in helping solve the demanding information management challenges of today’s marketplace. That’s the reason we were the first database on the 64-bit platform. It is absolutely compelling for the reasons that you’ve been hearing about this morning. Today, I am pleased to make a few more announcements that I believe will help extend DB2’s leadership with both technology and our place in the market.

At the beginning of the year, we started our Opteron beta program for DB2 on Linux. Over the past several months, we’ve had several customers and partners working with us on this advanced technology to get in a position to deploy it for market. Today, I am pleased to announce that we are really opening this up to the open market, to the general public, and we are making this beta available on the DB2 website for download from the public. I am also very pleased at DB2 being the first database on 64-bit Opteron for Windows. We are going to be giving a demo of this technology. We are going to be showcasing it right over here in this very building today. So we are very excited about that. Finally, to demonstrate our commitment to the platform, we will make DB2 generally available for Opteron over the next few months.

Now, we just released that our customers will be able to deploy the world’s fastest, most scalable database for their mission critical applications on the AMD Opteron. This combination is a very compelling combination that allows you to scale between one or ten-way nodes, or a hundred nodes, or even thousands of nodes with DB2, to help drive information infrastructure. As Hector mentioned, we are the market place leader in data management software. Last year, IDC declared that DB2 was the leading database for the Linux marketplace, with over 56 percent market share on Linux. A part of that leadership program is a partnership program that does validation.”