Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison says his customers should migrate theirIT 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-sourceoperating system. One year ago he told delegates at the AppsWorld 2002conference in Amsterdam that he did not believe Linux was ready formission-critical IT systems.

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

'We have taken advantage of the lowest cost infrastructure there is - Linuxon Intel servers,' he said.

Oracle has switched all of the servers that run its in-house installation ofthe 11i ebusiness software to Linux on 2-processor Intel-based machinescosting around $6000 each.

And Ellison says the results have surprised a lot of people in the company.

'It runs faster and more reliably,' he said.

'The first thing we did was switch our demonstration machines to Linux. Ithink 90 per cent of the people in Oracle thought they couldn't run a demoon Linux because it would be too slow. But they were shocked - it gave verysubstantial performance improvements.'

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

Ellison was making an unscheduled appearance in San Diego. His original planwas to speak via videolink from New Zealand, but he was able to attend inperson after his Oracle BMW Racing team was eliminated from the America'sCup sailing competition last weekend by a team from Switzerland.