The effort is focused on enhancing flexibility for institutions as open standards become pervasive and Linux takes on a more significant role in the global financial services industry.

"Linux addresses many of the key challenges our customers face, including lowering costs, improving competitive differentiation, and reducing time to market," said Imad Mouline, chief technology officer at S1. "Therefore, Linux is more often part of financial institutions' IT plans and is an important consideration for S1. We believe there is a prominent place for Linux in a bank's overall solution and the S1 Enterprise solution, and we plan to work closely with partners to accelerate our involvement with Linux."

"Banks are finding that Linux is made-to-order for their hybrid computing environments. Linux is playing an increasing role, not only in the data center - its stronghold - but now even in bank branches, where tellers use dedicated terminals that run specialized applications over thin servers," said Mark Greene, general manager, IBM Global Banking Industry. "S1's front-office solutions for financial institutions, combined with IBM's commitment to J2EE, Linux and open source architectures, enable banks to lower total cost of IT ownership without sacrificing performance at the branch level."

Ron Young, vice president of product management and strategy at S1 added: "Not only do we believe that Linux has great potential to lower our customers' total cost of ownership, but we also leverage Linux today in our Global Data Center to improve our own cost of ownership."

S1 already utilizes several versions of Linux in its federally audited Global Data Center, including support of a Web server environment. As part of S1's leading managed hosting solutions for financial institutions, Linux provides competitive performance, uptime, and customer value, resulting in operational efficiencies for S1's hosted customers. Linux has been a quick-deploying data center solution for cost-effective, yet highly available and secure operations. The management and monitoring of the Linux servers has fit seamlessly into the rigorous 24x7 monitoring operations of S1's data center.

S1's recently announced acquisition of Mosaic Software will also help to accelerate S1's Linux initiative. Mosaic has built a great deal of expertise in utilizing Linux and is planning to implement its Linux-based version of the Postilion product at a U.S.-based bank in January of 2005.

"Financial services providers see that Linux is a viable alternative environment to support strategic drivers as they strive to re-engineer business, improve agility, optimize costs, and enhance efficiency," said Jon Hall, executive director of Linux International. "S1 is taking the right steps by elevating the importance of Linux in its solutions."