As director of IT, Matthew Clark was part of the team that reviewed the Linux option. The company's ratio of administrators to users is currently 500 to 1 (although he plans to lower that to about 450 to 1). "With Linux it would have been 150 or 175 to 1. We would have had to hire three additional administrators for every administrator we have right now working on Unix," he says.

Iams isn't surprised to hear that assessment. "That's traditionally been one of Suns' strong points. They've optimized their systems for that metric," he says.

Clark acknowledges that the administrative tools have improved since Qualcomm last reviewed its Linux options, but he still thinks Linux would be more costly. "If we started today with the new [tools] coming out we might be in the neighborhood of two [admins] for every one." While the numbers didn't add up for Linux as a Solaris replacement today, Clark is impressed with Linux's overall capabilities and says it will continue to have a place at Qualcomm. "We like the performance and we recognize that throwing a whole bunch of little boxes at things can work really well in certain applications."

Blanchard agrees that Linux doesn't work for every application. He's seen cases where Marriott's IT team has looked at a Linux migration and decided not to proceed. But overall, most of the platforms moving to Linux at Marriott today are high-end Unix systems. He thinks the technology and the tools are sufficient for Marriott's needs. "We started talking about enterprise-class Linux systems ten years ago. It took a while to get that up and running," he says. The strategy now is to continue to redeploy on Linux.

It also helps that Marriott's system vendors are supporting the initiative. Rather than trying to convince the hospitality company to stay on Unix systems and high-end server hardware, both IBM and HP have been helping to make those migrations go smoothly. "Our vendors are very comfortable with this transition," Blanchard says.