Prepared For:

Kathryn King

Director of Information Systems

Elliot and Lynch Investment Consultants

Prepared By:

Jamie Johnson

December 3, 1997

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Executive Summary

Introduction

Choosing the right System (OS) is of utmost importance particularly for a company. It is the OS which determines what applications can be run, which in turn determines the usability of the computer infrastructure. To keep up with competition, our company decided to upgrade the current computer infrastructure which ignited the need to adopt a new OS.

The four main features our company wants in the new OS are: network readiness, security, stability and a large application base. Three other features which are of a secondary nature are cost, ease of use and manageability.

There are three OS's available in the market today which fit Windows '95 ('95), OS/2 Warp 4.0 (OS/2) and WindowsNT 4.0 Workstation (NT).

After extensive research via books and the Internet, an interview with a system administrator and feedback from employees, my recommendation is that the most suitable OS for our company is the WindowsNT 4.0 Workstation.

Analysis

I came to this decision based on the following facts:

Though both NT and OS/2 excelled in networking and stability, security options of OS/2 left much to be desired. NT was the only government C2 certified OS (for its security) of the three.

'95 came out on top in the race for a large application base and backend compatibility. But its security and stability had a number of weak links in them.

NT had the second largest software base from the group of OSs selected. OS/2 ended up a poor third.

NT clearly comes out ahead when the three OSs are compared, focusing on the primary issues. Judging the OS's using secondary issues as a yardstick, '95 is the clear winner. This is because the cost per license of '95 is a quarter of the cost per license of the other two OSs;, feedback from the employees favored '95 as the easiest OS to use, and its plug-N-play feature makes '95 the most manageable and configurable.

Recommendation and Conclusion

The greater importance of primary issues outweighs '95's lead over NT in the secondary issues, making NT the most suitable OS of the three for our company.

Selecting NT as our new OS will help fulfill our company's short and long term connectivity goals. Its stable nature and secure architecture will be up to our company's expectation and finally, its wide acceptance in the market guarantees us a large base of new and advanced applications.