"We have had a very good experience with Linux and open source and are looking to assess it more this year in terms of CRM and our intranet," Morton said, adding by the end of the financial year all the server work will be completed.

Thrifty's messaging infrastructure is powered by CommuniGate Pro on Linux and its desktops are either Windows 2000 or XP with Microsoft Outlook and Office.

Morton will assess the newly-released Windows Vista in time but it has already arrived pre-loaded on some new notebooks.

Solutions First managing director David Kempe said Thrifty now has a fully-redundant, two-node cluster running Ubuntu with an IBM FastT SAN.

"The central booking database Cars Plus is a Cobol database running on SCO binaries [and] they were stuck on Red Hat 7.3 and we upgraded them to Ubuntu Dapper," Kempe said. "You just can't do that on platforms you don't have the source code to."