How would a Microsoft shift toward a software-as-a-service model affect you? It wouldn't cut us out. Most software companies will build applications that companies can host as a Web service. Others will build solutions that they will sell directly, a la Salesforce.com. The case against that scenario is that you have big corporations with a lot of complexity and proprietary knowledge inside their systems who prefer to keep that inside the firewall.

I understand why the resellers are worried. Their distribution channel won't go away, but it will get small. SaaS is a migration the industry will go through. These things are always trends. Demand for information always outstrips supply. It's the business corollary to Moore's Law. No client has ever had enough money to do all the things they wanted. If SaaS makes some things simpler, users will still discover they have other needs.

Since most of your clients are big Microsoft users, how much Linux do you see? Linux is mostly about replacing Unix. Sometimes you see a customer want to use Linux for real foundation services like directory, or file and print. But not often. And if you look at the licensing models of Red Hat and Microsoft, there's not much difference. If I was a CIO, I wouldn't sweat what ends up to be a few hundred bucks more for a Microsoft server.

How much open-source do you see running on top of Windows? In the developer space, there is tons. People are not going to buy Red Hat simply to run JBoss. If they have Windows, they are going to use it. But in general, unless you're a very young company with very limited resources, people have better things to do, better ways to spend their time, than to build software that may not be tested or supported.

Do you see any interest by companies to adopt the OpenDocument standard? I haven't seen any interest. Anything that's government-sponsored, ask yourself, is it still around? I remember working in aerospace in the 1980s. There was a programming language called Ada. The DOD and ARPA both wanted it to be the standard language of the world. Today, you can't find it anywhere but in embedded fighter systems. If you look at our industry over time, stuff like that will get legs for certain reasons. But share wins.