It is hard to overestimate the importance of the mobile communications market today and the role that Linux is playing. Today, we welcome a guest post from IBM’s Jean Staten Healy who gives us IBM’s take on this rapidly growing area for the operating system.
Mobile Computing and Linux: The Next Big Opportunity‚Ä®
By Jean Staten Healy (@jeanstatenhealy), Director of IBM Worldwide Linux Strategy
‚Ä®‚Ä®Businesses and consumers are fast creating a mobile world — there will be nearly one trillion Internet-connected devices in 2011 — and open standards such as Linux are necessary to make this new world work. ‚Ä®‚Ä®
Some of the most promising business opportunities for mobile computing are in fast-growing economies such as India, China, and Southeast Asia, where mobile phones — not PCs — are the most common way for people to access the Internet and conduct e-commerce.‚Ä®‚Ä®
Traditional markets like the United States and Europe, too, are exploding with the proliferation of 3G and 4G networks. 143,000 cell phone towers in the US alone are pumping terabytes of data each and every day across IT infrastructures everywhere. 


Embedded Linux runs on virtually every smart phone today and will help support the 20 times more mobile data and 40 times more spending on mobile transactions that are forecast to occur in 2015.
‚Ä®‚Ä®Consumers don’t know Linux is in their phones, but developers do. The proliferation of smart phones like iPhones and Droids portends that application development for the mobile platform with Linux is only set to grow; a recent Eclipse survey showed that 33 percent of developers now use Linux as their primary development operating system, up from 20 percent in 2007. ‚Ä®‚Ä®
By keeping IT infrastructures open, there is ample opportunity for the Linux community, software developers, entrepreneurs, and even large enterprise to drive business value from mobile platforms.‚Ä®‚Ä® IBM believes mobile computing is key to building a smarter planet. It’s also the next big thing for the Linux community.