Microsoft White Paper Sample

Most IT organizations are not in the business of building and supporting operating systems; rather, they are charged with delivering the information technology application services and productivity tools that other departments and end users within their company need to accomplish the organization’s primary business goals. For most IT organizations, the goal is to enable the company to be a better, more competitive business. By comparison, most commercial Linux providers are building their business around a long-term support program designed to maximize the value, performance, and functionality that their subscribers can enjoy.

IDC believes that in many cases, a noncommercially supported Linux distribution can fill a set of requirements that an organization may have. We also believe that for mainstream business workload deployments, including infrastructure servers supporting legitimate and critical business requirements, the right choice is to deploy a commercially supported form of Linux, especially in enterprise datacenter environments.