[Updated Feb. 1, 2002 — added photo] New York; LinuxWorld — (press release excerpt) — Thirsty attendees at this year's LinuxWorld Conference and Expo could leave their change at home and order drinks using a PDA or smart card.

At its LinuxWorld booth, IBM featured an intelligent vending machine which takes e-commerce from the Internet to the snack room, allowing customers to purchase items using a variety of wireless devices.

The vending machine demonstration shows how the Linux operating system easily supports a wide range of software, hardware, and pervasive devices, mirroring a sophisticated enterprise e-business.

IBM technology transforms a simple vending machine into a state-of-the-art e-business. The following products are part of the intelligent vending demonstration:

• WebSphere Everyplace Server (WES)
  
• WebSphere Everyplace Suite, Embedded Edition (WESee)
  
• WebSphere Portal
  
• IBM pSeries 640 Model B80 eServer
  
• MontaVista Hard Hat Linux
  
• Intel StrongARM embedded processor

With the intelligent vending machine, customers can see how to preserve existing Web investments and extend business process to support mobile devices, which can improve productivity. The demonstration also shows the ability to track inventory real-time, a key benefit to e-commerce customers who want a streamlined, efficient order fulfillment process in place.

For more information on intelligent vending and other IBM Pervasive Computing applications, please visit: www.ibm.com/pvc or for more information on IBM's Linux-based offerings, visit www.ibm.com/linux.

The demonstration was cosponsored by: IBM Pervasive Computing, IBM GlobalServices, IBM Software for Linux, and IBM eServer for Linux.

 
This article was originally published on LinuxDevices.com and has been donated to the open source community by QuinStreet Inc. Please visit LinuxToday.com for up-to-date news and articles about Linux and open source.