Minnesota Moving To Microsoft's Cloud

An anonymous reader writes "The State of Minnesota is apparently the first state to move into the cloud, agreeing on a deal to have their messaging and collaboration services delivered through Microsoft's Business Online Productivity Suite. The thing the article doesn't tell you in detail is that the agreement precludes the use of open source software, which could have saved the taxpayers millions of dollars. And once such a large organization goes Microsoft, it's difficult to go back. Isn't it interesting that these developments occur right before elections, as senior officials are trying to keep their jobs with a new incoming administration? What do you think, Slashdotters? Is this a good move for Minnesota? Or a conservative move that bucks the trend of saving money and encouraging open government and transparency by aligning philosophy and practice with at least the option of utilizing open source software?"

Comments

Re:Foo

[mangu]

What guarantee does OSS make that will save taxpayers millions of dollars?

Just a wild guess, but I'd say that it's because you don't need to pay to use it.

Initial cost is a small piece of the cost

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't just compare the upfront costs. What are the on-going support costs? There's even an open source tool to calculate TCO: http://www.tcotool.org/index_en.html

Re:Initial cost is a small piece of the cost

[dbIII]

because someone at the MN governor's office can pick up the phone and say "WTF? HELP" and they WILL get support.

That's not how it worked out for an Australian airline's outsourced booking system a few weeks ago. The millions they paid didn't include the sort of redundancy that can withstand the failure of A SINGLE DISK, and they'll be arguing about the outsourcing contract in court for probably about the next five years.
You have to be very careful what you outsource the closer it gets to the core functions of your organisation, doubly so when it's going to an obfiscated platform where you have no choice other than trusting a single vendor.
Also reputations of vendors matter. I would not touch Microsoft as a hosting vendor with a very long pole after a University near me lost their Microsoft hosted student email for over a week. The failure was blatantly obviously caused by a typo in the DNS records for a Microsoft Exchange server farm but it took over a week to get that information to a person at Microsoft, who probably fixed it in under a minute of being informed. The problem is the vendors you outsource to often JUST DON'T CARE, so you have to consider whether you can afford to lose what you outsource for what should be ridiculous amounts of time.
The choice of platform matters far less than the choice of what control you hand over.
Also "retraining" for office software is now a complete bullshit argument since a large number of office staff really don't know how to use the Microsoft products either. When was the last time you saw somebody that isn't actually a programmer write a macro? Give these people any of a dozen or more word processing programs and they'll find the few things they need in minutes.
As for Excel, the macros need to be converted to the new version of MS Office anyway which is why so many people are still on MSOffice2003.

Re:Initial cost is a small piece of the cost

[Anonymous Coward]

I worked in corporate IT at one of the largest provinces in Canada. We had Microsoft premier support and they never did anything more than tell us what patches were available for download. We had 60,000 nodes on our network. I was technical lead for Internet applications hosting and no MS Lips ever got anywhere near my ass. In fact, we generally felt we had a successful support call if they admitted that we were entitled to support within 24 hours.

Re:Initial cost is a small piece of the cost

[Anonymous Coward]

CentOS is authorized only for test environments

This is bullshit. If a distributor of Linux would tell you that, they would be violating the license. The license does not permit you to impose further restrictions on the people you give the software to, and if you do violate the license, you lose the right to distribute the software at all.

This actually means that if either RedHat or CentOS told you this, they would technically be distributing pirate copies of Linux. Though the license is formulated in such a way that the receiver of such pirate copies can use them legally.

Re:Initial cost is a small piece of the cost

[JonJ]

I would think he means that his employer only permits the use of CentOS in a testing environment. Are you going to try and force them to put CentOS in their production environment with the GPL in hand? They're gonna love you.

This is the Cloud space we're talking about

[Anonymous Coward]

While those are valid points, we're talking about a cloud here. You don't see what OS you're dealing with if you don't want to.

For example, take salesforce.com. That is entirely based upon RedHat Enterprise Linux. It used to be Solaris/Sparc, but they found that x86 was much cheaper. They serve 88,000 companies with 1,500 Dom0 servers. And the cool thing is that they've integrated mobile devices (phone and pads) with their cloud. So you can handle your apps from your office PC, or smart mobile system. That's one heck of a competitive advantage for businesses.

And the funny thing is that I had a debate recently with a rapid Microsoft zealot who gave me the usual (outdated) MS hype about how Linux was a rip-off of UNIX, yada, yada. He was also a solid zealot for salesforce.com. He shut up after I mentioned that salesforce.com was a Linux shop, and his beloved tech was running on Linux.

The numbers above come from a recent RedHat dog-and-pony show about their new Cloud technology. They trotted out a guy from salesforce.com, and these are the numbers that he gave.

Now, I'm wondering where that leaves Suse and Ubuntu in the Cloud space. They can do like RedHat and hire Wipro to write their semi-proprietary Cloud stack. Or they can go with Open Stack and give NASA and Rackspace a hand with their Open Source Cloud.

Re:Worthless summary

[Anonymous Coward]

If you RTFA, they are switching from existing Novell and Exchange Servers and consolidating to Exchange. Moving from on-premise to the cloud for Exchange should be seamless and reduce the cost of local administration and on-going hardware maintenance and software patching.

Re:An idiot wrote TFS

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah right.

i'm sure tim pawlenty (whose claim on history will be having given minnesota's infrastucture budget to his rich pals in the form of high-bracket tax reductions - with predictable impact on, particularly, the I-35 bridge) and michelle bachmann are more than happy at your retconning of history.

hubert fucking humphrey? from the 1960's? you asshat.

Re:Foo

[mangu]

It's interesting how you ignored the other points raised, such as retraining staff and converting documents between formats.

You mean like training people to use Windows 7? Converting Visual Basic stuff to "dot net"?

Re:What does that mean?

[RobertLTux]

okay lets try this
N copies of OSS software = 0
Nmillion copies of OSS software = 0
N Billion copies of OSS software = 0
Cost for Required conversion to OSS format = 0 (there is no cost unless you really want to)
training and support for new programs = Unknown since it depends on if you do a FLAG DAY type cutover
Cost to recover from virus/worm/X-ware related shutdowns = 0 once you have a complete LINUX setup
hardware cost to update your systems as required = most likely 0 unless you are already due for a refresh cycle

Re:Foo

[cjcela]

Not to mention that for the same performance, you need three times the hardware to run Windows 7 vs Linux or BSD.

Re:Foo

[saleenS281]

You do need to pay to get support. There is absolutely no way any corporation, including the government, would ever run business critical apps without support. Get real.

Re:Minnesota Values...

[ctmurray]

As a Minnesotan I too am dismayed that we would be leading this transition. No matter what the proposed savings might be, it will certainly cost money in the short term. We don't have any money, but a $4B hole in the budget to fill for the next biennium. Recently we had some flooding in the southern part of the state, and it looks like we will have to borrow money to cover any aide we might want to spend on this emergency. Let some other state be the guinea pigs and see if the savings pan out. By then the economy might recover and we can get competitive bids for the services offered. Like many fads in IT or business (anyone remember Six Sigma) it does not pay to be the first on your block adopting the fad.

Re:The thing the article doesn't tell you in detai

[hedwards]

If you read the article, the agreement with Amazon says no such thing. The state had previously agreed to use MS for all their messaging needs.

Source article from the summary

Officials said the state did not seek bids, or requests for proposals, for a cloud computing system as Microsoft hosted suite was already a standard part of the earlier large licensing contract signed to consolidate the messaging systems.

Re:Wow - two totally separate things

[hedwards]

True, but open document formats do, and MS has a reputation for being a pain in the ass to access with software they didn't develop recently.

Re:Foo

[Penguinisto]

A $40k per year Linux admin is unheard of. The average is almost $90k, $10k more than the average Windows admin. That's great if you're a Linux guy, not so much if you're a business trying to save money.

You missed something: A business only needs 2/3 to half as many *nix admins in most cases - a competent admin can automate the vast majority of what is normally required (or expensive via third-party toolsets) in a Windows-only environment (for instance, compare SCCM vs. an in-house YUM server.)

Factor in the costs of re-training all your staff...

More FUD, and for two reasons:

1. re-training is a fact of life anyway. Ask any Exchange Admin trying to turn his/her Exch2k3 server farm into an Exch2k7 or Exch2k10 one. You'll be spending the money on training whether you like it or not. (and in Exchange's case, you have to train these folks to use a CLI anyway - like it or not)
2. Any sysadmin who isn't at least passingly adept at Linux by now is likely incompetent and/or ROAD ("retired on active duty" - i.e. lazy beyond belief). Either condition is useless to a company, and detrimental to the admin's own career.

Re:It's all the same even for alternatives

[Bob The Cowboy]

That is unless someone cal tell me how a move to an [open source alternative] would be better. Even these OSS alternatives have to be supported. The last time I checked, their support was anemic! Just ask the University of California.

Are you retarded, or just trolling/FUDing?

The article you linked to doesn't mention any OSS alternatives, nor any support costs/availability of anything. (Also, Mashable is the best you could come up with for a source?)

What the article you linked to (titled, "Major University Dumps Gmail Over Security Concerns") actually discusses is that the University of California in Davis just stopped their pilot roll-out of Gmail due to concerns that it wasn't secure enough. In actuality, its not clear if Davis would even be allowed to use Gmail at all, as the article notes, "[school officials said] outsourcing e-mail may not be in compliance with the University of California Electronic Communications Policy."

Later in the article it mentions that other organizations (such as the City of Los Angeles) are adopting Gmail. The whole thing is hardly damning of Gmail, and doesn't even mention OSS.

Mods: Don't just assume that someone's citation backs up what they're saying. Parent is off-topic and not particularly insightful.

For me, I can say that when my previous employer switched over to Gmail for our email it was a huge boost to uptime, and a dramatic drop in cost compared to the (unfortunately) poorly supported in-house Linux-based OSS email server and the Exchange server we were quoted.

Bill

Re:Minnesota Values...

[Jethro]

Michelle Bachmann is the representative for a very specific part of Minnesota. This part does not include the Twin Cities metro area. The VAST majority of us Minnesotans are routinely horrified by her words and actions.

I'd love to vote against her, but it's just not worth moving to St. Cloud.

Re:Foo

[jimicus]

While I know for a fact it's possible to have a whole farm of Windows servers run well - I've seen it happen - I haven't seen it recently.

I've seen Windows systems go wrong, I've seen admins who show no interest in figuring out why that is - let alone actually fixing it, but instead go with the old "Retry, reboot, reinstall" mantra. I am 90% sure that the reason Windows admins are cheaper is because the incompetent morons are pushing salaries down for everyone, and hiring managers can't tell the difference between an incompetent moron and someone who knows what s/he's doing.