In a recently published commissioned report, Forrester constructed a composite organization based on interviews with six enterprises that chose to use Windows and Linux together in their datacenters.
Using that composite it came up with a Total Economic Impact (TEI) of standardizing on SUSE as the Linux platform of choice to work with a Windows server environment.

According to Forrester, that composite realized an 82 percent ROI in under a year with regard to licensing fees, implementation and hardware. Benefits included improvements in operational and capital cost efficiency, IT administration cost savings, increased system availability, as well as higher levels of end user productivity.

Microsoft and Novell funded and provided feedback on the report, but Forrester says it maintains editorial control and does not accept changes that contradict its findings or obscure the meaning of the study.

The report is available for download in pdf format at http://moreinterop.com/download.aspx?filePath=/upload/3/7/4/{374ED6CE-1FF5-49C3-8210-162B1AB7FD34}TotalEconomicImpactInterop.pdf

Take a look and see if you think it provides info that’s pertinent to your enterprise. Let me know what you find of value in it—or what you think is missing.

[about me: Pete Bartolik blogs for IDG on behalf of moreinterop.com from Novell and Microsoft]

Wow - MS & Suse funded a report that shows MS & Suse are a good thing. I'm sure that Forrester was totally unbiased in the report and that's why they didn't study things like MS & RHEL or Ubuntu or even (heaven forbid) Linux WITHOUT MS.

The title of this post should have been "MS and Suse issue self serving press release disguised as an independent study".