In over two decades of system development IdeaMachines has only found two operating systems which meet our requirements for determinism, reliability, support, documentation, and ease of use - DEC VMS and Windows from NT to Windows 7.  Our systems are often expected to be in service for a decade or more.  While software contracts don't compel Microsoft to support legacy systems, our experience has been that most all of our older applications run, some, remarkably, as 32 bit applications on 64 bit systems.  Our requirements for interrupt service determinacy are only met by Windows and real-time kernels.  For our principle deployment platforms we don't find it profitable to use any other OS, and we have experimented with "open source".

At least one database is part of every IdeaMachines solution.  We began with Oracle.  Our conservative customers regarded Oracle as the commercial standard.  One customer asked if Windows SQL would be sufficient.  We ported our application easily and found we could exceed the commit times we worked very hard to achieve on Oracle, and will now only provide Oracle if a customer requires it.  Jim Grey of Microsoft said "data should be stored in databases," and we have learned how right he was.  Our installations are all specified for 24/7 operation, and SQL is fully capable of being backed up while commits are in progress.

The .NET Framework has become the de facto standard, and because of that, we seldom need to actually write library calls.  Our modeling environment, integrated with Visual Studio, translates the objects defined by UML models into the procedural language - usually C# for us - which makes calls to .NET.