IBM (IBM) today announced it will open more than a dozen new development centers in China, Brazil and Russia in an effort to accelerate innovation around the adoption of open standards based solutions in emerging markets.

The new Innovation Centers will provide developers and business partners with easy access to IBM's technical skills, resources, and business expertise to help them more easily build, deploy and optimize customized solutions based on IBM's open middleware and hardware technology. As a result, business partners can go to market faster, while reducing development costs.

A shift is occurring in the marketplace, as governments in emerging markets such as Brazil, China and India continue to move away from proprietary technology infrastructures to Linux-based business solutions. Leading IT market research firm IDC estimates that in 2004, the Chinese government was the largest user of Linux, accounting for 28.2% of Linux server sales and 29.6% of shipments. The firm points out that the government plays an important role in the development of Linux in order to support China's domestic software industry and that the government not only actively encourages people to adopt Linux via policy, but is also leading the way by adopting Linux for e-government projects.

The new Innovation Centers will be launched in Brazil and China and expanded in Russia, over the course of the next three months. These centers are designed to help business partners develop, test and deploy solutions based on IBM's open technology infrastructure, and they complement the 25 Innovation Centers IBM already operates for business partners worldwide. In China, IBM's Innovation Center and Linux teams will be housed within Open Partnership Centers, providing business partners with additional resources to fully integrate Linux and IBM's open hardware and middleware into their own products.