Lifetime used Macs through the '80s and the early '90s. In 1994, the company realized that Macs were not doing well in the business arena, and we had to choose something else.

We made a strategic decision to standardize on Windows NT 4.0 back then, and we've stayed with Windows all the way through to Windows Server 2008 today. Standardizing completely on Windows in the mid 1990's created a very sturdy cornerstone for us to grow on. We have carried those decisions forward for the last 13 to 14 years, which has helped us lower TCO and protect our intellectual property.

The business has discussions around that topic every single day. If you cannot properly manage your intellectual property, even down to rights management on emails, your innovations as a business are at risk. Simple fear does not drive this concern—it's just the reality of globalization today.

One tool that does a particularly good job for us is Microsoft Windows Rights Management Services (RMS). RMS embeds itself into Outlook so a user can quickly protect emails or Word documents that leave the company and would otherwise be unprotected.

These exchanges, for example, could be between our legal department and attorneys. Hence, we use RMS.

SharePoint is also significant, with its different layers of permissions and the restrictions it places on what goes in and out of its associated databases.

The third thing I would mention is group policies in Active Directory. This plays a key role in keeping our intellectual property in one place.

Standardization carries significant benefits in the areas of cost, employee productivity, and user experience, all of which bring very predictable results to the business. That's what it's all about—making sure that you can guarantee certain things to the business in terms of services.

This type of standardization extends beyond Microsoft for us. We have done the same thing for our hardware. When you come into Lifetime Products, you will find only Hewlett Packard switches, desktops, printers, and servers.

I will give a business answer and not just an IT answer to this question. User experience is very consistent across all of the tools our people use. That is one of the strongest points from the business side. Everybody is used to Microsoft software. They use it at home, they understand Outlook, and they have used it everywhere. The mobility pieces share a similar look and feel, etc.

A quick adoption rate is usually the make or break for software these days. It's not just the act of providing good software to users that makes a success. Rapid and complete user adoption—as well as how well users can utilize the tools—actually defines the success of the implementation for the business.

Over the last five years, the productivity gains from standardizing on the platform have benefitted our business units even more than they've benefitted IT.

I'll give you an example. I sat down with our Vice President of Sales and some of the CRM team from Microsoft yesterday. We were talking about our upcoming adoption of Microsoft CRM, and our VP wanted to know if we would be able to have the sales team quickly get access to CRM from their mobile phones.

The answer was easy, because we already have the Windows Mobile 6 platform on all of our phones. I was able to solve the need right away, because we made a decision to standardize on Microsoft years ago.

We really value the relationship we have with Microsoft, and we try to thank them every day for being not just a vendor to us, but a trusted advisor. The local Microsoft team here in the Desert Mountain Region understands Lifetime's business very, very well. They can help Lifetime understand the next relevant move Microsoft is going to make, so that we can respond in order to improve our business.

Microsoft Exchange and the Mobility area is on fire with innovation. We have adopted some of the early pieces, like unified messaging, which has changed the culture here at Lifetime.

There are some focus areas that I am seeing Microsoft adopt in general, like the integration of presence in many applications, and eliminating the concept of the desk phone, which lets people be more mobile. These are great innovations.

We are passionate about gauging the fiscal success of our Microsoft standardization efforts. I run the IT department at a lean less than 1% of revenue, and beyond cost, we receive a wide range of benefits from our strategy to standardize on the Microsoft platform.

I know I could not match those results if I used the siloed open source approach.

We have adopted some appliances that are Linux based, that simply require an IP address. We have an appliance that records from the security cameras on our network. Having those types of systems does not break standardization, because we have light support of those systems. They are just appliances.

Where Linux and open source have the strongest value, in my opinion, is when they're used in an extremely hardened, almost invisible appliance that can sit on a network and require limited access to maintain. Those simple solutions just run like a toaster, and that's where I have seen the value of open source in Lifetime's IT.

I have had many discussions around that, and I would have to say that as long they standardized strictly on one large vendor, such as Novell or Red Hat, they could probably see many of the benefits that we are seeing on a Microsoft only platform.

That said, here is the problem with standardizing on a Novell or RedHat. I don't know of any other company, save Microsoft, that can be the sole provider of all the products you need to standardize completely as an organization.

People who run Novell still have Windows on the desktop. People who run RedHat still, for the most part, have Windows on the desktop, and they often mix Exchange into their network as well.

I have not seen a company that can run its business on a Linux-only network, or a Novell-only network.