Levine moved to Linux cautiously. He looked over the possible savings (which he estimates at $13 million in the first year) for a few years before leaping. Though Levine has an IT staff of 650, including 350 developers, he bought full support contracts from Raleigh, N.C.-based Linux distributor Red Hat and IBM. "It's possible that open source is supportable without a major vendor," he says. "But our feeling has been that without major vendor support, we're gambling, and there's no use gambling. So we held off until HP, IBM and Sun stepped forward and said they were going to support it vigorously."

Even with that support, Levine tested the Linux system in parallel with his old Unix system for six months before switching over in March 2002. It's run with just a couple of minor hitches since then, he reports.

At DaimlerChrysler, CIO Unger deployed Linux to kill the three supercomputers that the company uses to run crash simulations. She turned the three into 108 Intel servers running Linux, all whirring away on the crash dummies' misfortunes.

"We expected cost savings, but we were surprised at how big they were: 40 percent for hardware, software and service combined," she says. But then Unger saw something she didn't expect: an application performance improvement of 20 percent. "Everyone thinks you just do this because of cost reduction, but we're seeing other factors." Besides improved performance, the machines are simpler to manage. Based on the U.S. experience, Unger did the same thing to DaimlerChrysler's Mercedes crash simulation center in Germany, with the same results.

Free at Last...Well, Not Yet

If there's a roadblock to universal open-source adoption, it's the lack of industrial-strength enterprise applications to run on Linux, things like CRMCRM and ERP. But the difference in 2003 is that CIOs are demanding to know what the vendors are planning to do about that. They didn't much care before. Alles zu CRM auf CIO.de