Motorola is the latest company to jump on the Linux bandwagon with the launch of a strategy for embedded and high availability Linux products and services.

The company said the performance and flexibility of the Linux platform and its open source environment will help speed time to market and help reduce development costs for its OEM customers.

Dave Peters, software product manager at Motorola commented: "Linux is now ready for design and deployment in the embedded market. The Linux OS will give us the opportunity to bring PowerPC and Intel into the embedded market in a level playing field."

Motorola is partnering with Lineo, an embedded Linux software company and Caldera Systems as part of the strategy.

The company plans to ship system platforms with Caldera's Openlinux and will refer customers to Lineo's Embedded Linux software development kit.

The first Linux based offerings developed as a result of the new strategy are called the EMS Series for telecommunications, office and industrial networking applications, ad the SLX Series network appliance, aimed at Internet, Intranet and Extranet networking applications.

Motorola said the products would be available worldwide in September.

According to research company IDC, Linux holds a 17 per cent share of the server market today. In addition, the company said Linux server license distribution reached 750,000 in 1998 - equalling all other Unix server license distributions combined. Actual Linux deployments far exceed the IDC number since a single license may be used across multiple platforms.

Noel Lesniak, business manager for the Linux platform at Motorola commented: "We are seeing rapid growth in interest in Linux across our OEM customers. The open source environment has a lot of appeal, there's a comfort factor in being able to get to the source code."