Slashdot Mirror
Telstra To Put Linux On Desktop
StArSkY writes "The Australian has an article today outlining how Telstra, Australia's largest Telco, is switching to Linux and open source on the desktop. Their pilot has been quite successful, and improved stability has been noticed. On trial are Star Office, Gnome, Mozilla and Wyse. Spending AUD$1.5 Billion a year on IT, means Telstra using Open Source is a massive boost to Open Source developers and support professionals. Not mentioned in the Article is that Telstra also just Dumped IBM Global Services, and will be running IT in-house again! Telstra will be hiring Linux-savvy people I think..."
For the last couple of years they have been increasingly conservative, increasingly anti-competitive and increasingly stupid. They artificially inflate their Telstra Shop profits with their exorbitant call costs and line rentals (Really, charging $20/month to a rural person who makes 2 calls a month???). Not to mention how they ripped off millions of mum and pop investors with the whole T2 failure. However. Supporting Linux is a good thing, so ummm, I'm a little confused about how I am supposed to feel about Telstra now...
The article mentions training costs, so I doubt that they'll be hiring. Looks like they're going to attempt to re-train the current staff. Or at least those staff that aren't in India.
It starts with a small scope. In some, small, area, Linux is "good enough".
Then, somebody asks: "What about..."? - and it works there, too.
And then somebody else asks: "Well, it worked here, what about..."? and it's good enough there, too.
This process continues until some major company decides to bet their farm on it - and it's good enough for that.
Suddenly, everybody sees it. Everybody recognizes the value. This is a turning point. One of many, but one of the big ones.
Linux is now widely recognized as "the future". As a Linux user, I routinely have conversations where Linux is "the future" and it's not questioned anymore.
With paying clients. And other vendors.
Linux is on its way. In 10 years, it'll be the default, like Windows is today still.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
It's really astonishing to consider: now is the time that the tide is rapidly turning in favor of Linux and Open/Libre Software. From large governments to ISP's, I can see an increasingly bright and prominent future for OSS. We should smile at the thought that years of dedication by talented and forethinking hackers is finally paying off.
I very much think that in 15 or 20 years it will be this current age we remember as being the watershed moment where the "technological civilization" is realized.
Sadly, from what I understand (not being an Aussie myself), Telstra is a horribly and unfairly run/administered corporation, that often reaks of anti-competitive behavior, viz:
"Australia's Broadband Woes" [http://ectnews.com].
Yeah, loving Telstra for moving to linux may still be hard cause quite frankly Telstra sucks. But you guys have gotta start doing what I have been doing for a year now. Become a telephone whore.
I've never stayed with one company for more than about 4 months before I switch to some new 'welcome back' plan another phone company is offering. The only way services will increase while prices drop is if there is considerable competition. Do your bit for Australian telecommunications and be a phone whore.
I must admit I am currently with Telstra but Optus has offered me a 'hard to refuse deal' to come back to them. I'm just waiting to see if my local Telstra affiliate Cooee will beat them both.
So change you phone companies like you change your undies ... once a quarter.
"Too slow chicken marengo" - The Cat
Perhaps some of the IT savings can be ploughed into letting me download more than 3Gb per month.
Probably about as much as the average home user spends on OSS...
To be quite honest, I'm surprised that more organisations haven't jumped on board the open source bandwagon; especially those who have a skilled IT department (Universities, Telcos, etc). I can understand small business owners wanting to toe the Microsoft line for the sake of being able to get advice from their buddies over red wine and dinner parties (or maybe it's the lack of OSS exposure?), but for those who know what they're doing and can afford to support it, there's savings to be had in open source.
Does anybody know how well Telstra pay? It could be time to dust off the ol' resume...
~
~
~
-- INSERT --
Telstra is probably saving more by ditching IBM Global Services than switching to Linux. The businessI work for outsourced all desktop support to IBM Global Services to save money a while ago and employee productivity has dropped due to the poor care of the desktops. They still have not addressed the Blaster and Welchi worms after weeks -- they never patched the desktops. IGS doesn't judge success based on employees being productive but how many "tickets" they can clear. Clearing a ticket does not mean a problem is solved, it just means they were able to push a problem on someone else. Even IGS employees call their ticket system, "ManageNow", "MangleNow". Its freaking scary what they do to you!
If you here that IGS is taking over your support, quit your job! You life will be less frustrating.
Aussie Aussie Aussie OI OI OI
Telstra is f**ken huge, this is a big deal in Australia.
Telstra was a monopoly till fairly recently (about 15 years ago they got their first competitor) and they still control all the telephone ground lines in Australia.
If Telstra adopts Linux/GNU, there will be thousands of desktops using OSS software and more importantly $US millions spent on research and development, most of which will be put back into the OSS community.
Believe it or not, there was actually a time when MCSEs made more than UNIX Sysadmins. We'll see what happens to your salary after Susanne Summers starts hawking RHCE training on late night tv commercials.
While you are worry about that, train in your replacement, Apu.
http://whirlpool.net.au/article.cfm/1183?show=rep
for those who are unfamiliar with good ol tel$tra
Those who can, do. Those who cannot, sue.
Broadband? They can't even manage a dial up account.
I tried for one month to get decent (better than 1kbytes/second) speed out of my modem, and was on the phone to the Testra Bigpond helpdesk for perhaps 5 hours all up.
I basically had two settings incorrect on my PC, they did not offer any useful advice on finding them, they were obsessed with getting me to reinstall windows, explorer, their cd and modem strings. Which I did, many times. Finally I found what was wrong, predictably enough it was none of the above.
So at the end of the first month I cancelled my account and switched all my telecom stuff to Optus, who have been fine. d/l speed is 5k, as you'd expect.
There are only two reasons why Telstra would make a press release announcing their intention to use Linux:
(1) 'cos they've found a way to further screw their customers by their use of Linux, or
(2) 'cos they've found a way to further screw their competitors by their use of Linux.
That aside, if you go one step further, and read the article, you see that they're actually not using linux at all. They're beating around the bush with lines about XP and NT and Sun and HP-UX and Solaris and Linux and Citrix and XP-on-a-chip and you-name-it. The article is completely meaningless marketeer speak designed to trick some journo's into picking up on the key words "unix" and "linux", and it worked.
Don't get me wrong, I'm as happy as the next guy if a large corporate makes the switch to Linux, but that's not what this article is about. Never lose site of the fact that Telstra are evil. Every bit as evil as Microsoft or SCO.
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Thinking about, I can see why they are going this way. For some reason, no one hear seems to be picking up on the thin-client idea. The more you centralize computing, the easier it is to handle. Instead of installing OpenOffice on all the desktops, just do it once on you server, and all the thin clients connect to it to get their software. Open Source lets them do this easily, since they don't have to pay for someone to design something for. All they have to do is use the free software, and pay people to get it down. The way I look at it the largest price tag here is the rollout of the project. After that, they can cut costs dramaticly, fire a good portion of their IT that isn't mission critical anymore, or outsource it easier since it's so centralize remote administration would be a breeze.
Yeah, I can see how they might be using this to their advantage, or mabey I'm just trying to see the negative.
stuff
Enought!! You compliment them too much. Telstra are nowhere near that nice. I would rather have rabid pitbulls strapped to my genitals than deal with the Telstra hellspawn.
Since the partial government selloff they have stripped all departments, especially R&D, of the smart and useful people who had designed, created and built the largest single phone system in the world. Now they claim to switch to Linux. Who will run and maintain these systems if they sacked all the UNIX wizards and let sub-contractors (IBM, M$)build a Win front to the existing core?
Lily Tomlin's Telephone Woman is a Sister Teresa compared to their helldesk or service dept.
Die Telstra Die
" It is better to ask forgiveness than it is to ask permission. " Admiral Grace Hooper
This is something that most ex-goverment companies turned private have in common. Telecommunication companies like Telia (Sweden) and Telenor (Norway) are exactly like that. Our goverments are so moronic that they think small independent companies can compete on fair grounds with these behemoths. In Norway, the private company Netcom got lucky and tapped in on the virgin land of digital cellphones in the early 90's.
Together with Telenor, they have a monopoly in GSM infrastructure and take whatever price is good for them. Just lately have serious goverment intervention made it possible for virtual operators to rent talk time on the infrastucture and push the prices down.
with IBM and Sun (and oracle, and bea, and veritas and ... you get the idea) behind linux that excuse is getting old quick.....
......
and actually you guys would be surprised the number of people/companies that run linux, the point is linux is silent, there wont be an outage caused by some worm/virus/maitnence like there is with microsoft, so you wont "hear" about someone running linux
(of course i am refering to server side software, desktop is another issue)
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
As the article says, there are alot of Solaris and HP-UX systems already in place and the platform of choice when I was there was Unix. Of course, there will still be custom windows solutions for alot of their in-house products which will still need Windows, however since most of their stuff is done in-house, it wouldn't be a huge step in rewriting an app for a different platform.
Microsoft sales reps are constantly told "Never lose an account to Linux - not at any cost"
Telstra are one of Australia's largest Microsoft customers. They spend $AUD1.5Bn/year on IT (not all of this is on Microsoft)
They're now in a good position (having made this all public) to go to MS and say "We've got a problem. We give you too much money. Fix this problem and we can talk"
-kai
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
Ballmer went there in 2002. He couldn't make them see unreason.
Having worked at IGS some years ago, I can tell that at least where I was, we were _brutally_ understaffed and overworked in the second level support unit. People kept quitting, yet IGS kept taking new customers, without hiring any new techs to replace the ones that left.
Projects were also often taken into production in horrific and unfinished state, leaving the support teams the unenviable task to finish the project while simultaneously handling operations and customer fault reports.
The last month I worked there I had a crapload of overtime, and over 200 hours on call. On call didn't just mean having your phone on, it meant being at most 15 minutes away from my laptop and a phone jack so I could dial in and start working on the problem. It basically made me unable to leave my apartment.
I have a friend who still works there, and apparently things are much better now, but I can only say the last year I worked at IGS was the most soul-corroding experience of my working life.
Is this going to be like that other place where there was all that hooplah about their switching to Linux, and it turns out they planned to run Windows in VMWare anyway?
"Sufferin' succotash."