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iTWire Technology Feature - Virtualisation
Technology news and Jobs 
The Linux distillery In the black: Why Linux makes financial sense
The Linux distillery In the black: Why Linux makes financial sense | In the black: Why Linux makes financial sense |
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| by David M Williams | |
| Wednesday, 28 November 2007 | |
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Page 2 of 3 Time after time I noticed the group would cite as recommendations for the business they had been working with that “they use Office 2000, we suggest upgrading to Office 2003” (or, now, 2007.)An example of a valid reason for upgrading might simply be that the organisation receives a lot of external documents from its customers and vendors and these are often in newer versions of Microsoft Word or Excel, and therefore the company was finding it received documents that more and more frequently were not supported by its existing software. This doesn’t mean the solution is necessarily to upgrade those products as opposed to finding an alternative, but at least the need has been demonstrated for something better than what is presently in place. And this is where TCO really ought to begin. Once the need has been demonstrated, you must then determine several options that fulfil the requirements. The first and most obvious option to many is to upgrade the products to their latest release. Yet, what if the operating system is an older version of Windows? Office 2007 may not be installable. And what if the hardware is substandard for upgrading to a new version of Microsoft Windows? The offhand statement recommending simply that Office be upgraded had a raft of potentially costly ramifications which were not thought out. Explain it to your CFO in their language: “One strong financial reason to avoid Microsoft Windows is that you do not know what financial impacts it will have over the life of the implementation, and nor can you control what that lifespan will be.” In simple terms, committing to a platform is not just a one-off OS purchase. It will require additional outlay to maintain the currency of applications, with increasing requirements. It will require additional fees to increase license counts as staff numbers rise. Veering away from open source momentarily, an example is the BlackBerry smartphone. I’ve succumbed to the crackberry’s allure and I could never entertain using a Windows Mobile handheld for my e-mail. Even without considering technical aspects, the BlackBerry is a known financial proposition. Research in Motion (RIM) have obtained favourable data pricing deals with telcos – in Australia, business users pay a flat monthly fee irrespective of the volume of data. This contrasts widely with Windows Mobile which has no such flat deal, and nor is it likely to ever have one, because of the lack of compression and the size of its rich-formatted messages. Consequently, a company can have full assurance their monthly BlackBerry bill will be a known value but there are no such guarantees about a Windows Mobile device. Back to computing, the major ongoing financial impact in computing is undoubtedly licensing. Many large software providers – and I’m specifically thinking of one in Redmond – have software licensing schemes which are so convoluted that a good deal of their customers don’t really understand what rights they have purchased. |
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