Hi,
thought I will share this news article
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/03/french-police-saves-millions-of-euros-by-adopting-ubuntu.ars
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France's Gendarmerie Nationale, the country's national police force,
says it has saved millions of dollars by migrating its desktop software
infrastructure away from Microsoft Windows and replacing it with the
Ubuntu Linux distribution.
The Gendarmerie began its transition to open source software in 2005
when it replaced Microsoft Office with OpenOffice.org across the entire
organization. It gradually adopted other open source software
applications, including Firefox and Thunderbird. After the launch of
Windows Vista in 2006, it decided to phase out Windows and
incrementally migrate to Ubuntu.
At the current stage of the migration, it has adopted Ubuntu on
5,000 workstations. Based on the success of this pilot migration, it
plans to move forward and switch a total of 15,000 workstations to
Ubuntu by the end of the year. It aims to have the entire organization,
and all 90,000 of its workstations, running the Linux distribution by
2015.
A report
published by the European Commission's Open Source Observatory provides
some details from a recent presentation given by Gendarmerie
Lieutenant-Colonel Xavier Guimard, who says that the Gendarmerie has
been able to reduced its annual IT budget by 70 percent without having
to reduce its capabilities.
Since 2004, he says that the Gendarmerie has saved up to €50 million
on licensing and maintenance costs as a result of the migration
strategy. He believes that the move from Windows to Ubuntu posed fewer
challenges than the organization would have faced if it had updated to
Windows Vista.
"Moving from Microsoft XP to Vista would not have brought us many
advantages and Microsoft said it would require training of users," said
Lt. Col. Guimard. "Moving from XP to Ubuntu, however, proved very easy.
The two biggest differences are the icons and the games. Games are not
our priority."
Support for open standards is a key part of the Gendarmerie's
emerging IT policy. Standards-based technologies give it more freedom
to choose which vendors it adopts and also makes it easier for the
Gendarmerie to interoperate with other government networks. It has
found that open source software is better at handling open standards.
Linux has also simplified remote maintenance tasks.
Linux has also been adopted by several other government agencies in
France. The French National Assembly runs Ubuntu on over 1,000
workstations and the Ministry of Agriculture uses Mandriva Linux.
The success of the Gendarmerie Ubuntu migration reflects several
emerging trends in IT. First, it represents the rising influence of
community-driven distros which are largely supported internally by the
organizations that adopt them. Analysts have noted a growing preference
for this approach which can be cheaper than adopting a conventional
enterprise distro like Red Hat with annual commercial support contracts.
The Gendarmerie migration also demonstrates the significant cost
savings that governments can get from adopting open source software. As
the global financial downturn continues to put pressure on budgets,
governments are going to increasingly look to open source software as a
way to cut IT costs. We have recently seen moves in this direction from
Canada and the UK.
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