IBM has announced that the AIX 5L V5.3 operating system has been awarded a certificate of conformance by the Open Group's Platform Forum for the UNIX 03 standard, which offers clients with greater flexibility. UNIX 03 is the latest UNIX Product Standard developed by the Open Group Platform Forum for the Single UNIX Specification version 3. Other UNIX vendors do not support open standards such as UNIX 03, making porting more difficult and resulting in fewer platform choices and ISV applications for customers.

The Single UNIX Specification is a set of open specifications that define the requirements for a conformant UNIX system. Operating systems that support the Single UNIX Specification provide a set of standard interfaces allowing applications that comply with the specification to be easily ported between compliant operating systems.

"IBM has been a long-time supporter of the industry initiative to develop the Single UNIX Specification and its associated test developments," said Jay Kruemcke, AIX offering manager, IBM System p. "This latest round of certification further solidifies IBM's commitment to the AIX operating system and its UNIX customer base, offering a standardized operating system platform that drives application innovation and enables integration among old and new information systems."

This achievement is another stepping stone in the long history of open standards support by AIX including being the first operating system to achieve UNIX 03 certification (for AIX 5L V5.2), and compliance with the predecessor standards such as UNIX 98 and UNIX 95.

"The Single UNIX Specification is a tried and tested standard that has delivered stability and scalability to end users for over a decade," said Allen Brown, president and CEO for The Open Group. "Enterprises that show a preference for operating platforms conforming to the UNIX03 standard are assured of industrial strength products and the opportunity to avoid vendor lock-in. In achieving UNIX03 certification, IBM has shown true commitment to its customers to provide open solutions and to back it up with a guarantee."

By leveraging the AIX 5L V5.3, customers will benefit from a flexible UNIX platform that is highly secure, reliable and available. Additional attributes of the AIX operating system include:

• Outstanding performance and scalability on systems based on POWER5 processors
• Leadership in Virtualization that can dramatically improve business efficiency and flexibility
• Mainframe inspired operating system features for reliability,
• availability and serviceability for exceptional availability
• Flexible security features that seamlessly integrate Clients' existing UNIX and Windows security infrastructure
• Strong security certified under the CAPP/EAL4+ and LSPP security standards
• Leadership support for open storage standards such as NFS version 4