IBM and Raytheon have created <A HREF="http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/21033.wss">an open platform for the Navy</A> specific to the development of weapon systems. This open platform will help reduce the number of crew members needed to sail on Navy destroyers, improve application performance and reliability while cutting application maintenance costs, and will lower the life cycle costs for weapon systems. The US Navy is consolidating and integrating applications for command and control, navigation, targeting, weapons control and radar systems. The platform consists of IBM WebSphere software and IBM BladeCenter servers running on RedHat Linux.