“User experience, application availability, ease of maintenance,
and stability are often chief concerns when deciding whether to
deploy Linux on the desktop. For the Allied Irish Bank, however,
the decision to move the 8,000 clients in the company’s U.K. retail
banking network from Windows to Linux had more to do with the
server than anything else.“That’s because AIB’s decision to upgrade its aging Windows 3.1
workstations with new systems running Sun Microsystems’ Java
Desktop System ultimately sprang from a decision to centralize all
of the bank’s data through Web-based applications running on a J2EE
framework…'”