If you think you know development after SCO UNIX, you may want to think again.

Here are seven surprising ways to think about your future.

You’ve had a good ride with SCO UNIX, but as SCO continues to struggle, you need a new platform for your solution - you need to make a choice. For many developers who’ve built solutions on SCO UNIX, Linux may seem like the obvious choice.

But is it the right choice? The future of your business could depend on the answer. Here are seven surprising ways to think about your future.

Opportunity
If you want to move your solution to the platform with great market opportunity, you want the Windows Server® operating system. The number of IT professionals planning a move to Linux has fallen fast over the past few years and Windows Server growth outpaces both Linux and the server market overall. Window Server is where your customers may be more likely to be.

Total Cost of Ownership
With Red Hat Linux, “free” can be awfully expensive. You pay annual subscriptions for every server, every year. And if you want 24/7 support, you pay more. Companies are finding that the total cost of ownership, the real dollars you spend to buy and support your software, are lower with Windows Server—up to 24 percent lower, according to one study.

Reliability
Reliability is more than just uptime. It’s a system that you can rely on to be easy to manage and configure every day. Linux administrators may juggle a variety of tools to install updates and make functional changes—and the changes they make can actually violate the support agreement with the Linux vendor. In contrast, Windows Server is a broadly tested and certified platform for applications and hardware, with standard and robust tools. Easy configuration and management, plus great predictability, add up to a more reliable platform.

Security
When “everyone can see the code,” your security features can suffer. The numbers prove it. Over the first 650 days of product life for Windows Server 2003, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, Windows Server had fewer published vulnerabilities—75 percent fewer. And the average days of risk for those vulnerabilities is as much as 73 percent lower. Windows Server has a comprehensive approach to security features, proactive security management, innovative security technologies, and a rigorous engineering process for developing highly secure code.

Choice
You don’t run “Linux.” You run one of the various commercial distributions of Linux, such as Red Hat or SuSE or Debian or CentOS or Fedora. Those commercial distributions are vendor-specific and migrating between them can be time-consuming and costly. That leaves you with fewer choices for staff, channel partners, tools, and support. If you want the platform with the largest ecosystem and the most choice, you want Windows Server. More than 750,000 Microsoft partners, 6 million developers, and the largest ISV community in the world are there to support you.

Manageability
Which platform helps enable customers to manage applications, workloads, databases, and business applications for improved efficiency and lower cost? If you want a comprehensive set of management tools and processes you want Windows Server.

Interoperability
Despite what you’ve heard, open standards do not equal Open Source. Windows Server gives you more out-of-the-box connectivity with applications from millions of independent vendors. Windows Server supports thousands of standards, plus gives you a standard, open way to access Microsoft technologies through licensing and translation tools, so you can innovate at will.

The next platform you choose could be your platform for unprecedented growth and success. Or not.

Think about it. Make sure your choice is the right one.

To learn more about your development choices, go to http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver/compare/compare_unix.mspx

or contact sales@dtrbus.com.