Mozilla employees will be rubbing their hands and beaming from ear to ear after Bob Sutor, VP of Open Source and Linux at IBM publicly announced that all 400,000 IBM employees will soon be made to switch to Firefox as their default browser.
Sutor broadcast the news on his personal blog, posting “All IBM employees will be asked to use it as their default browser,” adding that browser is “enterprise-ready, and we’re ready to adopt it for our enterprise.”
As of today, IBM will be installing the browser on all new computers and will be encouraging all its vendors to consider making the switch to the standards-compliant software. When installed, IBMers will also have the opportunity to receive formal training on its use to help promote IBM’s increasing reliance on cloud computing within its IT infrastructure.
Sutor was full of praise for Firefox, posting:
The longstanding commitment of Mozilla to open standards and the quality of the implementation of them in Firefox gives us confidence that this is a solid, modern platform that should be part of IBM’s own internal transformation to significantly greater use of Cloud Computing. Examples of this already include Blue Insight, an internal cloud for business analytics, and LotusLive, for online collaboration.
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Mozilla estimates that over 400 million people already use its software but an influx of IBM employees will give the browser a much needed numbers boost and provide it will yet more positive publicity, a definite feather in its cap as it attempts to see off competition from Google’s Chrome browser, another open-sourced browser aiming to muscle in on the internet browser market.
[H/T – Cnet]
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