It said it was a shift from the standard vendor-led, product-led approach, and noted its new approach with Linux would address critical business issues faced by both IT and line-of-business decision makers and claimed it make its customers more competitive in an on-demand world.

Its formula pretty much equates on-demand real-time transformational efficiency with open systems, which of course can mean open standards as well as open source.

IBM said its solutions would address optimizing IT investments; business flexibility; leveraging information insight and business resiliency; and security and compliance. Line-of-business solutions have been developed for 17 industry segments: aerospace, automotive, banking, chemical and petroleum, consumer products, educations, electronics, energy and utilities, financial markets, government, healthcare, insurance, life sciences, media and entertainment, retail, telecommunications, and travel and transportation.

IBM said it has aligned each industry-customized solution with a services-led delivery capability that supports all operating system platforms relevant to its customers, not just Linux, and is an extension of IBM's on-demand strategy, which is now tied more closely to Linux.

The company offered examples of its IT solutions for Linux that support on-demand, citing an Infrastructure for Automotive Common Environment (ACE) and claiming it simplifies and runs IT as a business. The building-block offerings are business driven application management; application platform unification; computing infrastructure simplification; and IT business.