, vice president of enterprise operations at Marriott International Inc., is serious about Linux. He says his company's transition from high-end Unix-based systems from and is ongoing -- and inevitable. "We're migrating, and we have a strategy to continue deployment of Linux," he says.

Tony Iams hears that refrain from IT executives frequently. "Companies have had a long-term goal of consolidating all of their Unix systems onto Linux," says Iams, an analyst at research firm Ideas International Ltd. The companies want to consolidate on industry-standard technology across the board, he says, and that means Linux running on x86 hardware.

But Norm Fjeldheim, CIO at Qualcomm Inc., decided to take a pass on a Solaris-to-Linux migration. The company does use Linux for some applications, but Fjeldheim's IT team concluded that migrating its industrial-grade Solaris systems to Linux was a dubious business proposition. "We're not moving from Sun to Linux. We haven't been able to make the economic case for it," he says.

While it appeared at first glance that would save money upfront on hardware and operating system costs by migrating, the price comparisons offered by vendors were based on retail prices. "We don't pay retail, [and] when we figured our discounts [with Sun Microsystems], the price advantages went away for Linux pretty fast," Fjeldheim says.

And that wasn't the only issue. His team wasn't satisfied with the quality of the administrative tools available for the Linux environment. At the time Qualcomm's IT staff did the assessment -- some 18 months ago -- the things that make an administrator's job easier "really didn't exist to the same degree in Linux as they did on Unix-based systems," Fjeldheim says. And that, he adds, would have translated into larger administrative costs.