Norway reports additional benefits from move to Linux

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Nov. 14, 2004

In the midst of a migration to Linux, the city of Bergen, Norway has reportedly expanded its estimates of the cost savings and other benefits it expects to achieve in switching from Microsoft Windows technologies. In a report at ZDNet published last week, Bergen CTO Ole-Bjorn Tuftedal says he expects to save 30 percent on hardware costs alone thanks to the efficiency of Linux -- this, in addition to cost savings associated with licensing fees and other economic benefits he had expected prior to testing open source for city-wide deployment.

When beginning the city's evaluation of open source in June, Tuftedal expected to save 40 to 50 percent on licensing and support costs by upgrading 100 Windows NT servers to 20 IBM Blades running Linux for Bergen's schools. The CTO also said he expected increased stability and greater manageability using Linux. He told ZDNet UK that he expects 85 percent of all schools to be moved to the new platform by year's end.

Tuftedal's team is also reportedly in the midst of evaluating a second project for Bergen that will move 20 HP-UX and 10 Microsoft servers running Oracle databases to 10 HP Integrity Itanium 64-bit servers running SuSE Linux Enterprise. Oracle connects the city's social services, document services, and other key functions.

At a conference in September, Tuftedal identified security costs as a key reason to move to Linux, estimating that those costs add between 10 and 20 percent to what organizations are already paying in Microsoft in licensing fees.

Tip of an iceberg

Bergen is just one city at the leading edge of a worldwide trend of governments evaluating Linux and open source for lowered IT costs. Linux won a spot on 14,000 municipal desktops in Munich, Germany, after a year-long decision process that saw Microsoft reduce its pricing, and even merited a visit from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Munich's 82-member city council officially approved a measure to switch to open source. The Ministry of Defense in Singapore, too, has publicly installed OpenOffice.org on 5,000 PCs and is planning to deploy it on a further 15,000 systems.

The governments of Brazil, Australia, Japan, China, India and Taiwan are among countries launching programs to evaluate and deploy Linux over the next several months.

UK's Office of Government Commerce (OGC) published a report urging governments to consider open source when implementing new systems or refreshing hardware following a year-long pilot program to study the viability of using Open Source Software across central government departments and the public sector last month.

For more details about the benefits that Norway has recognized during its migration planning, read the full ZDNet story here.

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