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Australian TCO Study: Linux Wins Again

Posted by timothy on from the ask-enough-and-you-shall-receive dept.

An anonymous reader writes "An updated Linux vs Windows TCO study has found that a 250-seat company can end up saving 36 percent if it were to equip its users with the open source operating system and applications that run on it."

19 of 396 comments (clear)

  1. What about a larger company by Myolp · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It would be interresting to see the results of a similar study when applied to a company with a much larger number of employees. Would the results be similar in a world-wide company with 10.000 employees located in different countries?

    1. Re:What about a larger company by adeydas · · Score: 2, Interesting

      interesting thought, i guess large companies would work better with linux too. though there is no formal survey many governmental departments in india run linux and our annual budget has come down a lot...

  2. TFA looks quite unbiased... by Gopal.V · · Score: 3, Interesting
    So far all the TCO studies I've seen are quite biased by the looks of it - except this one about TC0.

    But you underestimate the staffing issues there. Firing all your MSFT IT guys and hiring new "LinuxCompatible" admins is a big pain for most companies. Of course you fire 3 Win32 admins and hire one Linux admin by default :)

    For a new startup, a Linux desktop is invaluable , especially if you have a couple of in-house developers who use it regularly. That's where linux is slowly creeping into the desktop - not in the big companies with million dollar CTOs and kickbacks from Microsoft.
    --
    Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
  3. Biased in MS Favour by Karora · · Score: 4, Interesting


    It is very interesting the assumptions that they state have been made to bias this report in Microsoft's favour.

    • He said given the fact that the company deals in open source products, four aspects had been factored in to tip the scales towards Microsoft: The model was not modified to to reflect research by the Robert Frances Group which showed that Linux needed 82 percent fewer staff resources.
    • The costs of malware - viruses, spyware, worms, keyloggers, adware - were not taken into account. Zymaris said every research point found had suggested that this cost was essentially and predominantly a Windows platform cost, resulting in billions lost by business every year.
    • Costs which arose when systems need to be pre-emptively rebooted or crashed, resulting in unscheduled downtime, were not taken into account. "All our research indicates that Linux rarely if ever suffers such problems and open source platforms on the whole are extremely robust," Zymaris said.
    • "Finally, because Microsoft has claimed that introducing Linux into an environment will lead to increased reliance on external consultants, we have tripled the amount budgeted for such requirements on the Linux models," he said.

    Wow!

    --

    ...heellpppp! I've been captured by little green penguins!
    1. Re:Biased in MS Favour by boule75 · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Costs which arose when systems need to be pre-emptively rebooted or crashed, resulting in unscheduled downtime, were not taken into account.

      For all I know about Gartner's definition of TCO, downtimes and the production losses it generates, the costs to re-type corrupted documents (especially with Word 2003 which is a pure pain in this field), those of turnaround methods routinely used by users and technicians alike to avoid all kinds of pains, all those costs are not taken into account in the TCO definition.

      They are obviously very difficult to compute because 1 engineer hour lost costs much more than 1 secretary hour even if they are triggered by the same failure. Meanwhile, those are huge costs for the companies.

      On the other hand, I do agree with another poster: let us not underestimate the costs to migrate datas, especially "Office" data, to Open-Office: even if it works a record-high 97%, the remaining 3% will generate huge pains, especially when documents have evolved for numerous generations, with data pasted from various spreadsheet / word processors into Word.
      I recall having spent hours to convert a 50 pages Word document to OOffice Writer, because the original contained many hundreds "styles", some of them still bearing strange names like "Word-Perfect bold title 1" and so on (with language distinctions too!): the original .doc contained the memory of all software used to type the various agregated bits of text, and I am not so sure Word had effectively re-coded all those heterogeneous parts in its own format. This was a real pain.

      By the Way, Word was randomly crashing on this same document, but it managed to print it sometimes in full :-)

      --
      I am not Remy Mouton, unfortunately: http://remy.mouton.free.fr/art/
  4. TCO Studies a waste of time? by beezly · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Every TCO study I have seen into the cost benefits of Linux over Windows, and vice versa, seem to all be flawed. They are always paid for by someone with a vested interest in getting one "answer" or another. How can they be taken seriously... it's like going to Sun and IBM and saying "Whose hardware is better?"... I wonder what answer each company would give.

  5. Re:Crap by Plug · · Score: 4, Interesting

    No, the outcome and confidence is great. It says "Even if we did everything we possibly could to sway things in the Windows direction, and ignored a bunch of Windows' costs, Linux is still cheaper".

    Still cheaper. You can't necessarily put numbers on the price of spyware and reboots, but whatever that number is, Linux is cheaper than it already. It is not a case of "Linux is free if your time has no value" - it's that "even if you value your time at 3 times the price that you would on Windows, you are still better off".

  6. Re:uh by TangoCharlie · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Sounds like you need to be using Firefox, a free open source web browser... suitablly equipped with the Adblock extension. Then you wouldn't keep seeing the Microsoft adverts :-)

    Not having to read the Microsoft adverts will therefore increase your productivity. Proof that Open Source software improves TCO!

    --
    return 0; }
  7. Patch Day! by OMG · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Did anyone ever take into account what it costs to install a critical patch on every system in the enterprise and have to reboot each machine afterwards? I guess you need large numbers to compute the costs of such an operation in bigger corporations.

    Now, how often would you have to do that on which OS?

  8. My uncle will beat your uncle by frakir · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Tell that news to someone working in photoshop or dreamweaver or programming windows apps for living (something like 70% of programmers are developing for windoze now, today).

    Yeah Linux needs bigger market share and it will do good to all of us but TCO for many companies tied to an OS by definition makes no sense at all.

  9. Another flawed biased study by Keeper · · Score: 1, Interesting

    In this particular study, the biggest flaw is that decided that they had to pay full retail for the software installed on the machines (as opposed to getting a site license, which would cut costs dramatically; but as the study will later show, all they did was do a few searches on the internet to compile their information before they spent the 10 minutes it took to write this up). Not to mention that they absolutely must have the most expensive version of each package. Especially considering that they don't say what KIND of business it is they are trying to model. It also appears that every person in the company requires direct access to the database. Riight...

    A secondary flaw is their costing of employees. They don't factor in differences between contracting and hires, benefits, etc. Nor do they mention any cost of living factors for the study. Apparently they did some dumbass search on Dice.com to arrive to this figure. Then they do some handwaving and say that anything that can't be handle by the staff will be handled by consultants.

    And those consultants, boy howdy, will be used equally for both operating systems and cost exactly the same. No justification, no research.

    I could keep going, but it would just be a waste of time.

  10. Re:Actual Study PDF by bairy · · Score: 2, Interesting

    There is a possibility (s)he was just being helpful.

    --


    Get paid to search..It's geniune and
  11. Re:Um by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Train new employees.

    I put my nephew infront of a *nix box running gnome and he started surfing the web playing games and writing notes in OO.o; without any direction.

    Well, ok, I had to tell him that swriter was a word like program. Yes, I should have sent him to NEdit.

    Now I must admit, when I put him infront of Fluxbox, I had to tell him to right click to get the menu.

    Other than that, are you telling me that a 10 year old is smarter that most/all business professionals? He has never has sat behind a *nix machine in his life. Now come on.

    Todays major desktop Gnome/KDE are similar enough to MS that even a child can use it.

  12. Size of company by panurge · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Someone made a good point here that perhaps beneits from amplifying.

    The biggest short term win in TCO will come when the organisation is of such a size and complexity that it really only needs 1(one) committed open systems evangelist to drive through change. What slows down change in most organisations is the fact that most of the workers (and managers...) are not hugely intelligent - even in IT - and oppose anything that involves change or learning.

    If this is right, OSS will only really start to gain momentum where smaller companies which are adopters gain a competitive advantage that enables them to grow faster than the competition. Although IT is only a few percent of the business, a large saving in IT can make a considerable difference to the net profit - but it needs to be a large saving as a percentage of IT costs to make a real impact.

    This is good news for call centres and bad news for heavy industry. It would be a pity if OSS is associated in most people's minds with the modern version of cotton picking rather than high tech, but that could be the outcome.

    --
    Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
  13. What about productivity by tahpot · · Score: 2, Interesting

    One of the things these studies never take into account is productivity. I was a windows user for about 8 years and my productivity had completely platue'd out. For the last 6 months I have been using slackware and suddenly my productivity is increasing at a rapid rate - much more than I'd ever be able to do on a windows box.

  14. Why not compare to Mac OS??? by parvenu74 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Am I the only one wondering when we're going to see a TCO study involving the use of Mac OS? Surely there has to be some cost savings in reduced downtime and administration with using a Mac...

  15. Not a fit for all companies by zerofoo · · Score: 2, Interesting

    We've looked at Linux time and time again, and we've found that it works well as database and web servers, but we can't use it for much else.

    This may change with Novell's Enterprise Server comming out in January.

    Central user management with single sign-on? It's a pain in the butt right now on Linux. How does that impact TCO?

    What about all our apps that don't run on Linux? Speech to Text stuff that always falls apart in Wine, special educational packages that aren't supported on Linux? That doesn't help the TCO analysis either.

    We've got lots of hardware that won't EVER work in linux - network scanners, copiers and printers, raid controllers, CD-burners, network fax machines...etc. This isn't really Linux's fault - it's the hardware manufacturer's fault - but the TCO problem falls squarely on "Linux". Should we pay BIG bucks to replace all that hardware so we can save a little money on the OS?

    These studies aren't very good for anything except "rallying the troops".

    Those MS TCO studies that claim you only need 2 or 3 guys to support 15,000 windows users all over the world are also good for a laugh as well.

    -ted

  16. Re:Screw TCO by bhima · · Score: 3, Interesting
    This is wrong on so many levels I don't know where to start....

    We're talking about big multinational companies, so a lot of your evangelical strategies won't work, are inappropriate, aren't welcome and would get you fired. For example:

    In Step One: I work in R&D and my Boss (in fact the whole food chain from me up) is a Ph.D. Physical Chemist, and despite the fact and he's got the message (he uses firefox at home, for example) he has no control (or interest) over what IT does and thus I would be preaching to choir. All of the desktops in the company are standardized (choice of 4 types) and locked down, no one has write privileges to the local drives or local admin rights. Running an application that is not approved is a fireable offense, So is modifying the registry, Running a P2P app, Running a server, and Bypassing security. Setting up and running a wireless network will result in the IT guys immediately, on discovery (random 802.11x sweeps), escort you out of the building. Need something different or package installed? It's no problem, but you can't do it, IT does it remotely.

    In Step Two: Are you kidding me? They are not my servers to do anything with! I can not even enter the room they are in! They'd escort you out of the building.

    Step Three... Back to the PHB thing, the head of IT does not live or work in the same country I do, he's never even been on site, there is no way I could drop anything on his desk and if I did, it would be extremely unwelcome because not only am I not in his field, he's never met me. BSA is meaningless to us, we have site licenses for Microsoft's, Adobe's, & PTC's entire portfolio (along with a pile of other's, it's a 48 page catalog) and we're big enough to say, piss off you can't come in and inspect (trade secrets, you know).

    Step Four is the only thing you've said that makes sense or even vaguely doable, but it lacks a keyword: "Validated" and because of that would not considered.

    So what does that leave me with? Only things in MY domain: Data Collection, Device Control, Device Firmware and Molecular modeling. Here I've done a fair job. I use SuSE linux on most of the data collection and machine control boxes. I use SuSE, Free-DOS and Win-XP to develop on. If you look under the skirts of a lot of our devices you find that only the older ones have custom kernels, while the newer ones run NetBSD or Linux.

    I hope I haven't offended you or been overly negative, but a lot of OSS evangelists do NOT understand big companies. That's a large part of why we're still using Microsoft products.

    Don't get me wrong, I want to believe!

    --
    Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
  17. Re:Is that a surprise? by paj1234 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    After installing Linux, brace yourself for... (I've heard all these):

    "I can't change the orientation of my document from portrait to landscape."
    "I bought this new very cheap Lexmark all-in-one printer/scanner/fax..."
    "I wanted to duplicate a worksheet in the workbook so I dragged and dropped it in the worksheet navigator and it doesn't work."
    "I saved my document and emailed it to another company but they can't read it."
    "I can't type a Euro symbol."
    "How am I supposed to instant message?"
    "The fonts are all wrong and the document looks funny."
    "The document is password protected and I can't open it".
    "This e-banking web site doesn't work."
    "I clicked on the link on the web site and nothing happened."
    "The web site says 'unsupported browser'."
    "I clicked on the 'World Wide Web' icon and it said something about profiles."
    "OpenOffice takes too long to load."
    "I want to change my screen resolution." ...etc, etc...