One of the gating factors that keeps CIOs from making the decision to move from one operating system (OS) to another is the ability of the IT staff to support the new software. It takes time and money to train your staff on new software, and moving the entire organisation to a new OS is a particularly daunting challenge.

However, if you're considering moving some or all of your applications to Linux, you may be in luck. While Linux is a long way from being the networking OS of choice in the enterprise, many IT professionals have worked with the open source software on their own. In this article, we'll examine what TechRepublic Research has learned about the ability of organisations to support Linux.

Linux support is surprisingly widespread

Recently, TechRepublic Research conducted extensive surveys of IT professionals to determine their current and future OS plans. We've compiled the results in our Benchmarks, Trends, and Forecasts: Linux Report. (For more information on this report, see the tipbox below.)

One of the things we wanted to know was how confident organisations are about their ability to support various OSs. We expected that organisations of all sizes would be able to support both Microsoft's Windows NT and Windows 2000, given their market dominance. The results confirmed this, showing that 90.6 percent of respondents were confident that their organisations could support Windows NT, and 81.6 percent said the same for Windows 2000. We wondered what other OSs would garner widespread support.

Figure A

Support for Linux runs surprisingly deep.

As you can see from Figure A, almost half (46.4 percent) of the survey respondents said that their organizations could support the Linux OS. In fact, this was the best showing of any non-Microsoft OS in our study.

What makes these results particularly noteworthy is that more organisations appear to be prepared to support Linux than to support an OS like Novell NetWare, even though NetWare currently is used more often, according to our survey.

What can account for such a finding? There are several possible reasons:

• Linux is considered to be a rising technology. As such, many IT professionals are already studying it and learning how to use it, assuming that it will be a marketable skill in the near future.
• Many IT professionals use Linux at home for applications like personal firewalls. This gives the open source software an entree into professional organisations.
• Since Linux has some similarities to the various flavors of UNIX, IT professionals who are proficient in one can more easily pick up the other.

Whatever the reason, IT executives should spend some time inventorying the skill sets of their staff. You may well find that your organisation has the ability to support Linux even if you're currently not using the open source software.

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