The New York and American stock exchanges` information processing centre said yesterday that it had moved an e-mail program to an IBM server running Linux, one of the financial sector`s first steps to embrace the operating system.
The Securities Industry Automation Corporation (SIAC) said it had moved an application that sends daily activity reports to brokers from Sun Microsystems servers.
Gerry Sztabnik, director of middleware for SIAC, said the firm hoped to cut costs and test the open platform, developed by a worldwide network of programmers.
IBM has been a major proponent of Linux, but many industries have been leery of the system. "There is going to be a lot of interest," in the financial community Sztabnik said.
The e-mail program now runs on an IBM mainframe computer, a major machine divided up to mimic a number of smaller Linux machines working together, which improves manageability, Sztabnik said.
IBM and SIAC declined to put a price on the deal, but IBM mainframes range from around $150 000 to a few million dollars.
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