Ask Your People
Familiarity was another key reason the city of Chicago decided to deploy Red Hat.

"Our system engineers were familiar with it, so we had the knowledge base in-house," says Niersbach.

Lyman suggests that CIOs facing a Linux decision should look for an internal champion, someone who knows the field and has a favorite. If you have one or more of these people, they will be critical keys in whatever Linux you deploy.

"If you've got a champion in-house, that goes a long way," says Lyman. "You might have a couple folks on your IT staff that are totally into Debian Linux, and that might sway you to consider that."

That's exactly what happened at Hewlett-Packard, where the decision was made to employ Debian "because of the long history of technical collaboration between HP's internal engineering community and the Debian project," says Bdale Garbee, chief technologist of the HP Open Source & Linux Organization. "HP employs a number of current Debian developers, and has used Debian technology in various products over the years."

According to Lyman, interacting directly with the communities behind some of these Linux distributions and open-source projects is going to be an increasing trend.

"It's the same way that open source has crept into enterprise infrastructure: It's the developer team using it," he says. "Maybe the CIO isn't aware of it, or it isn't a huge priority for him or her, but nevertheless it's in use. We think that will continue to grow, and it will become even more acceptable as these communities mature and as companies watch each other to see how they do things."