French officials from the police organization Gendarmerie Nationale reported recently that they’ve saved millions of dollars by migrating their desktop infrastructure away from Windows to Ubuntu. The Gendarmerie started moving away from Windows in 2005 when they replaced MS Office with OpenOffice across their entire organization.
As we previously reported, back in 2006, when Microsoft released Vista, the Gendarmerie decided to migrate to Linux instead. Currently, they are running Ubuntu on about 5,000 workstations with long term plans to have their entire organization (90,000 workstations) running Ubuntu by 2015.
In the report, the organization discussed the fact that they have been able to reduce their budget by a jaw-dropping 70 percent without losing any of their functionality. This is a huge win for Ubuntu, which has been gradually taking over market share from Windows for years.
[via Arstechnica]
Open Source, gotta love it! The massive failure of Vista was a nice reality check for large groups to re-asses how valuable Microsoft really was. And then there’s the whole saving lots-o-money part.
Now…. the French could save some more millions by taking the same approach with their communications infrastructure and migrate it over to a mission critical Asterisk based infrastructure. There’s already PSAPS in the US running on Asterisk… so argue your case against Open Source VoIP but Asterisk is already supporting your 911 calls in many US cities so ha! and you probably never knew….
I think this is going to be the trend and should be a huge concern for Microsoft. Along with the migration to Gmail and OpenOffice.
Ubuntu is the most overrated distro ever put out. It’s not nearly as good as its fanbois portray it to be — certainly not moreso than many other distros. Its “success” is all the result hype and fanboi “marketing”.
You might argue that Ubuntu won over other distros because of ‘marketing’. I think it’s not only that, no matter how much marketing you do you cant ’sell’ junk (unless you are already a monopoly like microsoft). I am sorry to say that but Ubuntu won because it’s better than most Linux distros.
@ihu: You’re right to say that Ubuntu is an example of marketing success rather than being technically better than other Linux distros, but then again Microsoft Windows didn’t exactly become the dominant OS that it is through it’s technical merit! I think Ubuntu is exactly what Linux needs to hit the mainstream.