Slashdot Mirror
Telstra Used Linux To Get Microsoft Discounts
awful writes "Last year Slashdot ran a story about Australia's largest telco moving to Linux desktops. Turns out it was all a way to get some tasty discounts from Microsoft. The Australian is reporting that Telstra just signed a four-year deal with MS for $AU15-20 million, for 40,000 users. No figures yet on how much of a discount Telstra got, but MS might want to rethink handing back all its cash to investors if this is how they're going to do business from now on ..."
$500 AUD =~ $351 USD
$125 AUD =~ $87 USD
01100010 01101001 01110100 01100101 00100000 01101101 01100101
But this isn't just covering Windows Liscenses, It also mentions they're getting exchange 2003 and office 2003 plus they're probably getting quite a nice support package from MS. A copy of windows and office alone is more than $500 in store in Canada which has relatively the same dollar value as the Australian Dollar right now. Make No mistake, they definately got a discount.
For non-Australians in the audience, note that $1-AU ~= $0.70-US. So the cost estimates are around $10.5M - $14M US, or $265.50-$350 US per seat.
I've reciently acqured some refurbished Telstra harddisks, naturaly they were unformatted. There wasn't that much interesting information on the disks however I did notice that Telstra apps predominantly appear to be written entirely for MS Access or in Visual Basic. A linux OS would have to overcome these difficulties before it could be implemented.
Sigh....RTFA.
There's nothing in the story about USD. This is Australian dollars we're talking about.
$1 CAD ~= $1.07 AUD
Pretty damned close if you ask me.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
For the benefit of our American readership, Telstra are Australia's local piece of evil incarnate. They're 51% government owned, so they combine the worst characteristics of rapacious private companies and pig-headed government bureacracy. They price-gouge to an incredible degree on access to the local loop, they deliberately delayed the introduction of DSL services so they could cream more money out of business clients using ISDN (at truly outrageous prices), and deliver shocking service to their customers (ask Bigpond broadband internet customers about the reliability).
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
However, most of these are the sort of calls where the business is crumbling, while the best techs in the company all frantically try and recover an exchange server database where every second or third byte has been replaced with 00000000. [Replace with high severity scenario of your choice.]
Not Meta-modding due to apathy.
It used to be that Telstra had a yearly payment to MS and that was the last they thought about licensing, across the whole enterprise. I am not sure if the deal is still the same.
Go out and get sailing!
The stories are bullshit.
The truth of the matter is that Sun (the chosen, and ONLY Linux vendor) couldn't deliver an acceptable alternative platform, and Telstra refused to consider the vendor which could - Novell.
There were two factors which prevented a Linux deployment, collaboration and existing applications. There is no Sun equivalent to a full Exchange/Outlook environment, particularly for calendaring and availability management. Add Live Communication Server to the mix, and Sun's offering looks pathetic.
For applications, Telstra has literally hundreds of applications developed for a Windows platform over generations since Windows 3.1. Some would run under Crossover, with varying degrees of success, but there were key applications which were too dependent on the Windows platform, and integration with other applications, to be ported, and no budget to have them rewritten. In some cases, the source code for applications could not be found, making the job even worse.
At no time did Microsoft "panic" in relation to this project. They came, did their job, then negotiated a price AFTER the platform decision had been made.
Put simply, Microsoft offered a better solution. It worked, it satisfied users, and (taking ALL costs, not just licences, into account) it was the better financial option.
As for the earlier comment about Telstra running all its applications on a massive Linux grid, the poster must be smoking illegal substances. The bulk of Telstra's data processing occurs on IBM Mainframe or Sun Solaris platforms.
Price discrimination only comes into play when a company has at least some pricing (monopoly) power. This is because the company faces a demand that is flexible with regards to price (as opposed to a competitive market where you sell at the going market price or lose all of your customers). This only works if Microsoft can keep the stong effects of its monopoly working for them. Basically, MS will have to lower prices for other customers, at least for those customers over whom it has less pricing power due to competition from linux, etc.
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
Hell, if you're in charge of buying product X for your company and DIDN'T try to lower the price buying shows quotes from companies Y and Z, I'd worry!
This comment demonstrates why some admins shouldn't be purchasers. Professional purchasers won't compromise their ethics by releasing a vendors proprietary information (pricing). As a buyer my reputation would suffer if this behavior became common knowledge.
For those who aren't familiar with Supply Ethics visit the Institute of Supply Management's ethics page.
And, if MSFT stock options become less attractive, will they be able to retain their programmers for the same cash wages?
We'll see... MSFT stopped stock options and replaced them with stock grants, last year. And the recent options grants, back to '99 or so, are all underwater. MSFT brought in another company (Goldman Sachs I believe) to offer a buyout plan for underwater options - pennies per option.