IT managers who want to deploy an open source solution but are worried about company politics should go ahead and do it without asking, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) Japan IT manager Mark Uemura.

Faced with an unreliable network, Uemura went ahead and migrated systems from Windows to OpenBSD on the premise that management would trust his judgement.

"PricewaterhouseCoopers is a Windows shop but we were forced to use open source," he said. "I inherited a real nightmare with servers going up and down. There were e-mail outages and on top of that there was a bad relationship between our users and IT."

Speaking at this year"s AUUG conference in Sydney, Uemura said PWC chose OpenBSD, an operating system he is comfortable with, because of its "security, stability, and cost".

"Because we were all Windows on the client and server we had to make sure everything interoperated," he said, adding most of the migration to OpenBSD was replacing network security devices with Intel servers.