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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?"
Use MS software, and your boss will see it as MS's fault when it breaks. Use alternatives, and it'll be your fault. It's the 21st century analogue of "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM".
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
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.
Before I saddle up the war horses, can you provide a citation?
This is a serious allegation; tying arrangements are dangerously prosecutable under antitrust laws, as Microsoft should remember.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
What do you think, Slashdotters? Is this a good move for Minnesota?
Hmmmm... I've studied the data carefully and considered the pros and cons, taking account of the prevailing trends and allowing for all the variables. Based on my analysis I predict that the Slashdot consensus will be that going all Microsoft is not a good move.
To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. ~ h2g2
Probably less than the cost of being locked into no-shop clauses in an MS agreement.
Such a non-compete clause is most likely an anti-trust violation if TFS is correct.
A few years ago Minnesota was looking at mandating open standards for all government operations. Now they have taken a huge step towards vendor lock-in. This move will lock up Minnesota's history for decades to come. At the same time it will make the state's operations far less reliable.
The article comments that Minnesota is switching over to something businesses have found great success in for years. As someone that has to use BPOS at work I must say the system is incredibly unreliable. We have had email simply disappear into a void. The service is slow. It frequently stops working for hours at a time. We have had other email delivered hours after it was sent.
We had to disable rather important functionality in order to migrate over to BPOS as we are not allowed to customize anything. Now we have users doing things by hand which used to be automated.
Before we switched over to BPOS I considered email as trustworthy and reliable as most utilities. My employer has structured the company with the assumption that email will be a reliable communications medium. With BPOS in place it is a burden on our organization.
Although you're probably an AC Microsoft shill, there's precedent that says that open source systems fail-- see Project Limux that was thwarted in Munich. That said, Minnesota takes a huge chance on untested infrastructure, and indeed binds themselves to Microsoft's hosted products-- when many others might do the job. Let's see how the TCO for taxpayers actually amount to in five years.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
I guess this news should have floored me but it doesn't. We have an entrenched administration that has the mantra "No new taxes" which has a nice sounding ring to it but the result has been less pretty (like a major interstate bridge that just decided to fall into the Mississippi river). I was drivng down the freeway today and the truck was bouncing around so badly I had to slow down (and I was not speeding).
How does all this relate to moving to the Microsoft cloud? I am sure the state is getting a low cost price to get them in the door. Once hooked the price will go up and it will need to be paid and some other service will be asked to do more with less. Maybe the old lady in the nursing home will have to cut back on someting like drugs or catheters. Maybe a school will have to put off buying science textbooks (for the tenth year in a row).
Excuse me? Please do not relate any of Minnesota's Values to Michelle Bachmann. She is the worst kind of politician who has no intelligence what-so-ever. She continues to be elected by an extremely gerrymandered district that has had no real competition on the right and wouldn't elect someone from the left unless literally directly paid to do so. Minnesota aside, any words that come from her mouth have a tendency to be as hollow as her head and can not be trusted. She is an agitator and a crowd pleaser who we can only hope will somehow manage to lose an election so she can go wallow with her tea party friends somewhere outside of our state. She may make her direct electors proud but the rest (majority) of the state laughs at them and are embarrassed to be represented by her.
My guess is that the state of Minnesota already has developed custom software in-house that depends on the Microsoft platform. You migrate to a Microsoft cloud if your existing software is already locked into Microsoft platform. That's only natural. At any rate, the whole cloud computing concept is very simple: let someone who is good at running data center do their job.
You could very well argue that redeveloping the software to base on an open-source platform might be a better plan in the long run, and I would tend to agree with that. But the redevelopment will surely cost the state some millions of dollars more in the short run.
You also probably don't realize that software costs money to develop. Even when the software is offered to you for free, someone, somewhere is paying for it. That's because someone has to spend time doing something. In order to sustain the livelihood, that person needs to eat, drink, pay rent, and once in a while use medical help. When software gets open sourced, the person is donating his time and effort and has absorbed the cost of writing the software.
And don't forget that free software is not really about the cost. It's about the freedom to learn from the software, to modify the software, and to distribute your modifications.
I once had a signature.
I'm not sure your so-called point...
training and support for new programs = Unknown since it depends on if you do a FLAG DAY type cutover
Never worked at any large organizations have you? The cost of software licenses is trivial compared to the costs in time and lost productivity anytime you introduce a change in the workflow. Doesn't matter if this is switching to a new program, introducing a new program, or even an upgrade from the previous version to a new version. Case in point, we hired a new Sr. developer who had his IDE of choice. Cost: $249. We used an opensource IDE. We're paying him roughly $70 an hour all said and done. How many wasted hours of time learning the "free" opensource IDE does it take to cover the cost of that license? If switching to the "free" opensource IDE costs more than 1 day of productivity, it's cheaper to buy the program. (which we did). This looks like its a change in the background, from a users perspective they'll probably still be using Outlook, it's just the settings are a little different. The end user won't notice anything different in their workflow. They used Outlook before, they'll continue using the same program here.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Microsoft really DOES have good enterprise tools. If you don't know about them all that means is you haven't worked with it in a large enterprise. That is not useless. It makes things easier to manage, which means less support costs. Never underestimate how much personnel can cost. If you save $1 million per year on licenses going open source, but have to hire 20 new support staff costing $70,000 each (remember people cost more than just their base salary, have to account for benefits, taxes, and so on) to support it you've lost money, even if there is no retraining/productivity loss.
I'm not saying that would be the case here, I haven't studied their setup and don't care to, but then neither have the knee-jerk "OSS is cheaper!" folks. Sorry, but it may not be. It is complicated. In any setup you have to study what they have, what they need, what it would take to change, and so on. ALL costs have to be considered. You can't only look at license or hardware costs and ignore staff or training costs.
So just because OSS doesn't have upfront costs doesn't mean it is free.
We've seen that where I work. We do Windows, Solaris, and Linux. It isn't really optional, we do education and research that needs all of them. Fair enough, but let me tell you getting a central system that works with all three has not been easy. It cost a fair bit of money (in the form of Sun Directory Server and IDsync) and a lot of development by our staff. It was worth it, since we need it, but there was real cost, and ongoing cost to support it. On the other hand Active Directory just works. Does what we need right out of the box. In fact the Windows side runs all on the AD, that just syncs to LDAP. Yes, we have to pay for Windows licenses, but there is something to be said for the features that come with it.
I'm quite sure that OSS can work for a large enterprise because there are plenty of examples where it does. However glibly assuming it is easy or costs less is stupid. The needs to the organization have to be assessed, and you have to factor in ALL costs. You may discover that in some situations the answer is it actually costs more. What you save on licenses you lose in other areas.
"Sure, we could save some up-front money to Microsoft"
Of course, you would save 100% of use licences since using open source software you don't pay use licenses *at all*.
"but some of it would still go to Red Hat (all production Linux servers run RHEL, as CentOS is authorized only for test environments)"
Not some money, but some *other* money. Well, if you want support from Microsoft, you still have to pay it apart from use licenses too. Rates from Microsoft and Red Hat regarding support are basically the same, so you are at odds here -and you are still in front since you didn't pay for use licenses.
And then, public government is there to think about overall society benefit, isn't it? Even if now only Red Hat could bring proper advanced support for their products, if they are taking too large a profit margin what do you think that would happen? Support contracts at the State level are not peanuts and everybody is in the position to give proper support on Red Hat. Or any open source program for that matter. And then again, being Red Hat both open source and unix-like, it works lightyears better on integration with other solutions and with lightyears less risk of lock-in. You don't like Red Hat? OK, there's Suse, or Debian, or Ubuntu, or even FreeBSD and you can change to them with only minor transition costs.
Now, who can give advanced support on Windows but Microsoft? Where can you go appart from Microsoft when you don't like Microsoft without incurring large migration costs?
And that's exactly the point: Microsoft's basic strategy is based on lock-in, which being a variant of monopoly we all now what it does to the customers. And it's obvious both from common sense and past experience that it won't be any better tomorrow, so while meaning a large and expensive exercise, the sooner you break Microsoft's lock in, the more money you will be saving long term.
"the admins would have to be retrained or replaced at rates that run higher than the existing ones. "
You mentioned that rates were about 1:1.2 but, what about serviceability? Because if each Unix/Linux guy can bring to the table more than 1:1.2 when compared to Windows ones (and that's usually the case in my experience), you are getting savings *even* at a higher individual hiring costs. And then again, why do you think Unix/Linux guys get better wages? I'll tell you: on one hand because they diserve it (or else no one would hire them at such cost mark) on the other hand because of relative scarcity. Well, what do you think that will happen -and happen *fast*, with regards to scarcity if it's acknowledged that Unix/Linux guys are wanted in big numbers and payed over market average, specially if Windows guys needs start to decline?
Trouble Pawlenty, whose Indian name is Chief Tumbling Bridges, does not want to spend a penny, nor help anybody except the 157 million/billionnaires who he caters to. this is not a "big vote" for cloud computing, but he probably thinks by getting rid of infrastructure, he can get rid of more of the state government. it's foxes for the hen house.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
You pay for a copy of Windows and you get 10 years of guaranteed patches from the date of release. Not too bad over all.
Obviously you don't sign the invoices for Microsoft products. You don't just pay for a copy of Windows server. You pay for the sever, then for CALS besides the seat licenses for the products that connect to that server. With MSFT you pay and pay and pay. Their prices, their upgrade schedule, their partners.
With RedHat you pay for annual service at the level you want. Or you can go with something like ClearOS and get updates and patches handled for you for less than $250 year or go with CentOS and do it yourself.
You don't get those options with M$. Stop apologizing for greedy corporate fucktards.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
"The problem is the vendors you outsource to often JUST DON'T CARE"
There is ALWAYS one thing a manager must take into consideration when outsourcing a service that I haven't seen pointed out almost NEVER.
* The goal of an external provider is always offer as little as it can go with and ask for as much money as it can go with.
* The goal of an internal provider is always offer as much as it can asking for as little money as it can.
Somehow a lot of managers don't seem to get this simple fact straight.
this 'new-fangled' leenux
Not just Linux, even this argument is getting really old now.
Then once the smallest problem crops up, people would go "Why did you switch to such a rubbish system? We should have gone Microsoft" - again irrelevant of the change in problem amount.
Unfortunately this is very familiar. Yet, this "rubbish system" question can sometimes be eased by rasing attention to the rubbishness-list of Windows itself. There are several annoyances that people don't even realize since they have grown more and more tolerant towards Windows, given they were never given the option or the opportunity to use anything else. Awareness needs to be raised that blind acceptance is not the way to go anymore. Of course this is a harder task than it sounds, still, I'd really want to see those countless open source "evangelists" (what an idiotic job description) make a freaking better job.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.