IBM is to bet a "big piece" of its future by spending $1bn next year supporting the Linux open source operating system.

Chairman and chief executive Lou Gerstner has also revealed that Big Blue plans to invest a further $4bn during the next three years building hosting centres specifically for ebusinesses.

Speaking at a recent ebusiness expo and conference in New York, Gerstner said: "We're convinced that Linux can do for business applications what the internet did for networking and communications: deliver on the promise of truly open, interoperable, any-to-any computing."

"Fifteen hundred IBM developers are dedicated to Linux-enabling products and services, and not just for applications that run on a wristwatch, which we've built," he added.

Gerstner also predicted that the number of companies selling proprietary operating systems would fall. "This is a big issue for every server company. It's going to be interesting to see if, three or four years from now, anybody with a proprietary Unix system will still have a meaningful position in the industry.

"In fact, the movement to standards-based computing is so inexorable, that I believe Sun Microsystems, and for that matter EMC and Microsoft, are running the last big proprietary plays we'll see in this industry for a long time to come," he said.

As well as announcing IBM's plans to spend $4bn during the next four years creating an additional 50 ebusiness hosting centres, Gerstner said his company is moving Linux into "commercial production environments" by building the world's largest Linux supercomputer for Royal Dutch Shell.

The Belgium-based oil producer will use the supercomputer to run seismic and other geophysical applications.

Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM's vice president of technology and strategy, said: "The fact that Shell has decided to run these applications on an IBM Linux supercomputer demonstrates that Linux is coming of age."