The choice of Unix for a relatively small company may be unusual, but it has proved more than manageable.

"We've just found that Unix is more robust and leaves out all the prettiness to be working like a proper workhorse," says Therese Lamont, who serves as the company's managing director of administration. "The main guts of it isn't getting filled up with all of that extra stuff."

The moment of truth came for Lamont, however, when along with the move into the expanded office it became clear that a new, comprehensive and integrated business system was a necessity if the company was going to continue its growth. That system was Databuild, a specialized construction industry estimating, project management and accounting package that had already been informally used for five years by the company's estimating department.

Databuild, however, only runs in a Windows Server 2003 environment - a fact that forced the company to consider a plan to introduce Windows to its server room for the first time. "It was a fairly big expense that we didn't know we were going to have," Lamont recalls. "It was a bit of a shock."

Best of both worlds