The Hindu Business Line : `Windows scores over Linux in cost of ownership'

A Frost & Sullivan study commissioned by Microsoft on the total cost of ownership (TCO) of IT assets has revealed that Microsoft Windows 2003 environment across enterprises scores over Linux.

MS Windows 2003 has close to 15.9 per cent advantage over Linux and constitutes lower TCO in 80 per cent of the instances encompassing application servers, network servers and mail servers.

The study was conducted in 54 organisations (both high-end and mid-tier) across banking financial services and insurance, manufacturing, public sector and Government IT-enabled services, BPO and telecom verticals.

CIOs have realised that they need analysis that goes beyond initial purchase cost of a hardware or software, and indicates post-implementation operation, support and maintenance costs too.

Hence, there is a need to capture the TCO, the sum total of all direct and indirect costs associated with the lifecycle of an IT asset, said a Frost & Sullivan release.

The target respondents consisted of senior IT professionals such as CIOs, CTOs and IT managers among others of large and mid-sized enterprises (500 and more employees). The report was audited by Capgemini. Companies such as Ashok Leyland, Aztecsoft, B2K Corp, BSNL, Bokaro Steel, Directorate of Treasuries, West Bengal Government, Food Corporation of India, Godrej Industries, Haldia Petrochemicals, ITI, National Insurance Company, Tamil Nadu Small Industries Development Corporation, Sundaram Clayton, Tamil Nadu Water Supply and Drainage Board and Timken India, among others, participated in this research.

TCO comprises cost incurred by an enterprise in the course of selection (search and evaluation), installation (capital & deployment cost), maintenance and deployment (both planned & unplanned) and upgrades of software systems over the course of five years.

It also includes indirect costs associated with planning, audit and other incidental costs such as consulting, rollout, configuration management, bug fixing and testing and module integration.

Interestingly, in India, hardware is the largest component of TCO of enterprises while software cost is just about 15 per cent of the capital expense and six per cent of overall TCO.

Elaborating on the study, Mr T R Madan Mohan, Director (Consulting), ICT Practice, Frost & Sullivan India, said: "While assessing the TCO, organisations should evaluate the capital expenditure and operational expenses of the specific IT investment through out the lifecycle of the asset. More often than not the focus is just on capital expenditure, which leads to skewed decisions."

He added: "Specifically, while comparing proprietary software with open source software, the capex constitutes 53 per cent and 47 per cent respectively. Our analysis shows that while capex for Linux might be low, the operating expenses could be as much as 53.1 per cent higher compared to Windows 2003, primarily due to the high cost of support and manpower costs. Hence, it is prudent for an organisation to capture all necessary cost components beyond just the initial cost of acquisition."

He also said: "Our research revealed that for application servers, Microsoft Windows 2003 emerges with the lowest TCO, 22.4 per cent lower than Linux, where as for network servers and mail servers the TCO is 11 per cent and 8.24 per cent lower than Linux respectively."

According to him, Linux offers TCO advantage of 4.7 per cent in file print server and 24 per cent in Web server over Widows 2003.

"However, cost of maintenance and upgrades of file print server for Windows 2003 is cheaper than Linux."

Mr R. Ragavan, AGM (IT) of Sundaram Clayton (Brakes Division), one of the key participants in the study, said: "We are now able to maintain better uptime of the servers with lesser restarts. It is user-friendly for the system administrator to deploy the network access policies. The version controls are standardised. The IT staff is focusing more on improvement activities."

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