When the Olive project reaches its final stages, its applications will span many industries and be used for many purposes. Executable content permeates our society, but this content can be lost rapidly to neglect or deprecation because no model for preservation exists. Olive offers a remedy for this problem.

Academic Uses

The Olive ecosystem seeks to address a gap in preservation technology. Much of today's academic work consists of executable content ranging from databases and spreadsheets to full software packages. Olive will ensure that the academic work of today is still available in the future, regardless of hardware and software requirements.

Public Sector Uses

The robust needs of the public sector range from simple utilities to complex spacecraft. Olive can meet these needs, saving both time and money through emulation and preservation. For example, in the early stages of development, IBM Research talked with NASA about fixing bugs on spacecraft on the outer edges of the solar system by using Olive to modify legacy software on emulated hardware. This solution would avoid the incredible cost of re-creating the original spacecraft. The Olive project could provide entities such as NASA with a solution to these difficult problems.

Private Industry

From gaming to sales, Olive has many potential applications. By offering a means of preserving and re-using a stable execution environment, Olive could allow industry to maintain legacy hardware and software for clients in sensitive hardware configurations. In addition, Olive could allow game developers and graphic designers to execute old games which depend on obsolete hardware. Further, this executable archive would ensure that technological progress in the private sector could be preserved for future study.