[SonnyWortzik]

Integration. It is all about the integration. M$ platform is so tightly coupled that many companies see the value in spending on this tight integration than spending it on 25 different Engineers to manage their 40 vendors that may be needed to run some of these applications and platforms.

Dealing with one vendor, M$, is better than dealing with 20. You pay for one support package and get all the benefits that come with one platform.

As much as I love open source, I do see the benefit of working with one vendor on all of your stack needs.

M$ reporting systems of SSRS SSIS and other is probably their bread and butter when it comes to DB space. Very few want to spend 60-70 hours a week building complex command line reports where with SSRS and SSIS most of these tools come with a nice GUI that helps you build these reports. Sure there are others that do the same but most required a third party vendor to add to the functionality. For example Apache. With Java and Apache I've had to deal with literally 15 to 20 different vendors just to do the same thing I can do with one vendor. Jenkins, Zookeeper, Camel, Cassandra, Tomcat all under the banner of Apache, but in reality governed by their own set of standards. I mean take a look for your self: https://www.apache.org/index.html#projects-list