"My predecessor spent too much [so] I was told not to spend any money." When asked what argument he used to convince management to use an open source solution, Uemura said: "They didn"t have an argument because they said don"t spend any money." "They trusted me," he said. "The whole office was relying on one domain controller which was dying."

Uemura said a lot of work was done "behind the scenes".

"My experience is that if something has to be done, just do it - don"t ask! They will thank you later," he said.

In Japan large organizations like Morgan Stanley and the Bank of America have moved all their backend systems to open source, Uemura said, because with open source you can reduce IT operating costs without any commercial lock-in.

"We had a lot of downtime and data loss before we migrated over. After five months that was eliminated," he said. "There is a lot about open source that people don"t know. Many corporations tend to lump open source into one basket, which is a shame."

After the five-month migration, PWC"s servers are now equally split between Windows and OpenBSD.