"In the last year, interest in Linux has taken off like a rocket," says SAP's Stein. "We just passed 1,000 customer installations on Linux [out of 13,000], and we expect about 5 percent of new deployments to be on Linux."

SAP was the first major ERP vendor to offer its software on Linux, and all the others have now pledged to do the same. As always, pledges are one thing, delivery another. But with continuing pressure from customers to lower implementation costs, all major software vendors had better start coming through.

For CIOs, this is the year to start figuring out what to do with open source - even if it is nothing. Don Bullock, vice president of IT at Eaton, the Cleveland-based diversified industrial manufacturer, had his advanced technology group do two pilots with Linux last year: one on the mainframe platform and one to use Linux as a locked-down operating system for a voice recognition application on an Intel platform. He decided the incremental expenses of establishing a new OS (retraining IT staff and users, buying and integrating new hardware) was too great - for now. "But we're going to keep looking at it," he says.

Art Huffman, CIO at Halliburton, a Dallas-based oil field services company, has also looked at Linux, and he came to a different conclusion. He plans to move 13,000 users of his company's SAP system over to Linux in the next two years.

"We're looking to move to a clustered Linux/Intel platform to run the Oracle database," he says, "and we think the technology will be there. It isn't today. But it looks like the pieces are coming together."

Huffman has an open-source plan.

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