But if you can believe Ron Markezich, Microsoft Corp.'s CIO for IT, none of his bosses, not even hyper-competitive CEO Steve Ballmer, would bat an eyelash if he rolled out a non-Microsoft product internally.

"I could go and buy an Oracle database if I wanted to," said Markezich. In reality, while Markezich uses plenty of third-party software in-house, he also aims to make Microsoft the best living testimony to the merits of adopting an integrated Microsoft platform.

"This is not marketing talk," the 39-year-old University of Notre Dame graduate and former Anderson consultant said in an interview last week at Microsoft's Management Summit in San Diego. "I truly believe that a standardized Microsoft platform is the best way for me to do my job, and that Microsoft products are the best out there."

In an industry that highly regards those that eat their own cooking, Microsoft gorges itself. It uses SQL Server 2005 to run a huge 1.9TB database that supports its global SAP R/3 ERP system. It also manages 340,000 PCs and devices, virtually all of them on Windows, including more than 15,000 PCs running the upcoming Windows Vista. Its Exchange-based e-mail system holds more than 120,000 e-mail server accounts and handles an average of three million internal e-mails and 10 million e-mails from outside the company per day. Markezich, who has been CIO for two years and helped manage Microsoft's internal IT for 11 years, said that adopting Windows Server 2003 and related products enabled the company to save US$100 million over three years. Those savings came from, among other things, cutting the number of infrastructure servers by 30 percent, slashing the number of Exchange mail servers in half and saving 40 percent on the cost of backups.

"I couldn't have said Microsoft products were the best eight years ago," he said. "But I could say it after the 2003 wave."