International Business Machines (IBM) on Monday introduced an open desktop product for businesses that runs on all the major desktop operating systems and supports a range of applications, such as email and instant messaging, without the need to run Microsoft Windows.

IBM’s new product, dubbed "Open Client Offering", - pulls together a range of applications, some from IBM's Lotus family, and runs on the two major strands of corporate Linux, Red Hat and Suse, as well as Microsoft Windows and, soon, the Apple Macintosh.

In association with Red Hat and its main Linux distribution rival, Novell, IBM will provide operating system services, and would answer the questions over the cost-effectiveness of managing Linux or Apple desktop PCs alongside Windows PCs.

"We worked with the open source community and found a way to write software once that will work regardless of operating system. It will run on Windows, Macintosh or Linux," said Scott Handy, IBM's vice president of Linux and open source.

The new Open Client Solution enables any smaller or large industries to help their employees better collaborate, improve productivity, and lower the total cost of information technology ownership.

By using the new software, larger businesses can offer their employees a choice of running Windows, Linux or Apple Macintosh software on desktop PCs, using the same underlying software code, slashing the costs of managing Linux or Apple relative to Windows.

It costs around $4,000 to $6,000 per year to manage the average desktop PC of any office worker, according to technology market researchers Gartner and IDC’s estimates.

With the launch of new solution, the Armonk, NY- based world's largest computer company IBM has apparently attempted to take on Microsoft's desktop dominance.

Microsoft’s Windows has been dominating the desktop and personal computer markets for long with about 89.2% of the desktop market share, and Linux has managed so far to grab between 50 - 80% market share from Windows in the web server, render farm (a computer cluster which renders computer generated imagery or CGI), and supercomputer markets.

IBM will also offer a proprietary version of the Open Document Format (ODF) software for tasks like word processing, spreadsheets or presentations along with Lotus collaboration, instant messaging and blog tools, and the Firefox Web browser, which is the key rival to Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

IBM plans to use its "Open Client" software initially to run some 5 per cent or some 16,468 staff’s desktop computers across its own organization, which has 329,373 work force worldwide.

The new software, a combination of software and services, is initially intended especially for business users, but IBM said it was aiming to gain widespread acceptance, contending that the Open Client will cut the cost of running Linux or Apple, versus Windows.

The IT giant is due to uncover more about Open Client on Wednesday and Thursday at the LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit in New York.