Unix vs Microsoft: ERP Systems

[Severian]

@leenmi

Oracle. That’s who.

Oracle has to buy their own software?

[leenmi]

Departmental charge-backs, man. I work for a server manufacturer and we still don’t get the darned things free.

The point is, though, that Oracle is actively developing newer versions for Linux and they do, in fact, run Linux in house. Many companies are using Linux to run Oracle. In these times of shrunken IT budgets, everyone is looking to maintain their share of the pie at the expense of their competitors.

Oracle has realized that they can still charge exhorbitant licensing fees if they can cut the maintenance fees for operating systems/servers.

[rjung]

@friedo

And what Enterprise-level RDBMS’s does [MacOS X] run?

Sybase.

And Oracle Database 10g.

[rjung]

@Bongmaster

I think you’re putting the cart before the horse. Narrow down your choices for the ERP software itself, then find out what operating systems are supported and recommended. As far as the OS is concerned, I’d put a preference on whichever system your team is most comfortable supporting.
That was my line of thinking until Gartner came in and basically told us that most modern ERP systems that do what we need it to do prefer to run on server 2003. What a surprise that was!

Yeah, especially since Gartner has shilled for Microsoft before:

Far be it from us to suggest that the Gartner Group has fraudulently colluded with Microsoft, however suggestive the evidence. Could it all have been some horrible mistake? Could Gartner Group have been innocently victimized by a Microsoft partisan in its own ranks? Perhaps one of these scenarios is why the reports quietly disappeared – but not before taking much of the Gartner Group’s credibility with them, alas.

[Nars_Glinley]

I’m a little confused. Have you already decided on an ERP and are trying to decide how to run it or are you still trying to decide on one? If you haven’t picked one yet I’d agree with the “cart before the horse” statement. IMHO, the decision of which ERP to choose should be made with an emphasis on functionality that matches closest with your business processes. Although it’s important to take technical considerations into account, if you pick something that your users don’t like, the fact that you don’t have to reboot the server every week will be of little consolation.

We run PeopleSoft on Oracle (Tru64) with an MS2000 application server. They play nice together and we have very little trouble with either one.

[bump]

Yeah, what KRW said!

Seriously, you ought to have some kind of business requirements document that details what all requirements your business units have for this ERP, what it’s expected to do, how it’s expected to do it, what it has to integrate with, how it should integrate, how many users, what kind of data requirements, etc…

Not having this kind of stuff is what causes ERP implementations to fail, if only because without these kind of requirements, you don’t get buy-in from your users/internal customers and they proceed to passively resist your attempts to implement the system.
Now for the OP, I suppose it depends on your data needs and transaction volumes. Great Plains and XP server/SQL server are probably fine for small-mid size operations, but if I had a medium-large company, there’s no way on this earth I’d trust anything but Solaris, HP-UX or AIX with my company’s mission critical software. Granted, I have nothing but apocryphal stories to base it on, but I still think the unix world is more reliable and stable.