Broker and financial management powerhouse Merrill Lynch states in a story from CNET that they are finding significant savings by making use of Linux as a key operating system in their deployment.

Not only have they saved a bunch of money on the server side, but they are going to be trying out the operating system on the desktop in a pilot program later this year.

Best quote: when asked about reports that other organizations saw no financial benefits to a switch to Linux, the spokesman from Merrill Lynch said, "We've done our numbers, and we are a bank, so we know our numbers."

One other interesting tidbit is the comment about the virtual machine mechanism they use that allows them to set up a new virtual machine in "2 minutes 14 seconds". From this, it appears they are running multiple virtual machines on larger servers.