Using Open Source Software to Reduce Investments and Operating Costs

By the time you finish reading this article, you will realize some of the many benefits of using Open Source software, how it dramatically lowers your investments by reducing the cost associated with licensed software and its support.

We will look at existing uses of licensed software and how Open Source software can replace them while maintaining same level of productivity and reducing cost associated with licenses. Some of these implementations can provide greater level of stability and productivity without affecting your running business.

Intranet Services - Many medium and large companies have an intranet portal and other intranet applications, that are primarily used by only its employees. The cost associated with the Operating System and hardware is significantly very high when there are hardly couple of hundreds of hit on those web servers on a daily basis. Instead of using licensed software for the Operating system and the web server, switching to Apache and other free application servers [such as Tomcat] can reduce the cost associated with hardware and software licenses. Some companies have 50-100 such intranet servers only meant to serve internal content to its employees. Leveraging the free Apache web server which requires less powerful hardware will help in cutting down the cost.

File and Print services - Consider the example of a large media and publishing company. They might require frequent printing and file sharing services. Replacing Windows based servers with Linux and Samba will greatly reduce the cost associated with Operating System and offer better efficiency.

Email services - Instead of using propriety software where both the mail server and clients keep exchanging information for no apparent reason, if replaced with open source client softwares such as Thunderbird will greatly reduce the network traffic and also save on cost associated with client access licenses required to use email client software.

Spreadsheets - Not every user needs lot of features of MS Office and thus it can be replaced with a free license of OpenOffice product. People with experience of using MS Office products will require minimal training to start using MS Office. You might end up saving thousands of dollars just by replacing the MS Word and Excel with equivalent OpenOffice products. A computer that can run MS Office can also run OpenOffice thus eliminates the need of upgrading the hardware for using OpenOffice suite.

The TCO [Total Cost of Ownership] is always lower in case of Open Source Softwares, provided they are properly deployed. Evaluation of hardware, existing software, services, prior planning for deployment saves lot of time and increases the TCO associated with Open Source softwares.