Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison has suggested that his customers should migrate their IT infrastructure to Linux-based systems if they want to save money, increase performance and improve reliability.

Ellison has become a major convert to the merits of the open source operating system.

One year ago he told delegates at the AppsWorld 2002 conference in Amsterdam that he did not believe Linux was ready for mission-critical IT systems.

But 12 months on, he told the AppsWorld 2003 audience in San Diego that his company's experience shows that Linux is now a viable option.

"We have taken advantage of the lowest cost infrastructure there is: Linux on Intel servers," he said.

Oracle has switched all of the servers that run its in-house installation of the 11i e-business software to Linux on two-processor Intel-based machines costing around $6,000 (£3,700) each.

And Ellison confirmed that the results have surprised a lot of people in the company. "It runs faster and more reliably," he explained.

"The first thing we did was switch our demonstration machines to Linux. I think 90 per cent of the people in Oracle thought they couldn't run a demo on Linux because it would be too slow.

"But they were shocked. It gave very substantial performance improvements."

Oracle claims that 40 per cent of the companies using the vendor's outsourcing service for their software also run on Linux and Intel.

Ellison was making an unscheduled appearance in San Diego. His original plan was to speak via a video link from New Zealand, but he was able to attend in person after his Oracle BMW Racing team was eliminated from the America's Cup by a team from Switzerland.