Server and Desktop Solutions: What the Research Means for Small and Medium Enterprises

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) must carefully consider which of the two major operating systems (OSs) available—Microsoft Windows or Linux—will better serve their needs and be more cost-efficient to implement. Based on analytical hierarchy process (ADH), the research below continues to assess what each OS has to offer.

Evaluation and Findings

The evaluation and weighting of criteria are based on interviews with twenty information technology (IT) academics and professionals, over fifty users, the management team of a bank, two SMEs, and three universities.

The universities and the bank both use combined solutions, while the SMEs use a Windows platform. The majority of IT interviewees agreed that the Linux OS is mainly server-oriented and Windows is mainly user-oriented, but these specialists are able to operate within both environments.

Considering hierarchy variables and market offers, it is clear that enterprises have three potential OS options to choose from: free solutions, commercial open source, and closed source. A combination of these three is also possible.

SMEs run critical business applications on their servers and workstations, and therefore it is important that they have some kind of guarantee. Free solutions offer no guarantees.

Companies usually have their own specific needs and must be able to decide what system they will use to meet those needs. However, when two alternatives offer similar capabilities, arriving at a decision may become difficult.

Universities tend to prefer free solutions, but this is not the case in the business environment. Universities focus on cost of ownership (CO), unlike SMEs. Other interviewees consider management costs (MC) and resource costs (RC) more important in the long term. Opinions are divided between these two criteria. While management places higher value on RC, IT professionals prefer MC. In general, these two variables are interdependent. However, all interviewed parties agreed that server platforms benefit from lower MC, while RC is more important for desktop environments. When evaluating categories of MC, IT professionals and academics agreed that system availability is the most important factor for server needs, while user-friendliness is the least significant. Patch management is the second most important factor, with weight on the installation rather than distribution. According to the interviewees, this variable influences security management. Opinions differ somewhat when considering software and hardware compatibility. Universities are more interested in hardware, while professionals give both factors equal value. For all those interviewed, deployment is the second least important value because it is not frequently required. Integration is by far the most important factor of the deployment category because of the constant need to incorporate an existing system with new hardware and software elements. Installation is the least important to all IT staff, because it is usually performed only once.

When evaluating RC, all interviewees stated that resource availability is of extreme importance because it influences all other variables. This variable includes human and system resources. To SMEs, the second most important factor is salaries, whereas for universities and IT staff, patch and drivers availability are the second most important factors. All interviewees agreed that centralized availability should be given more weight than forums and groups. It is interesting to note that none of the interviewed parties considered consulting and technical support as essential factors. Their explanation was that these two elements are unnecessary if adequate training has been provided. Unlike universities, which tend to use free software without warranties, the business sector assigns equal priority to the total cost of ownership (TCO) and warranty variables. One explanation for this may be that CO is much more important to universities than to SMEs, and that universities assign the highest weight to free solutions.