Windows 2003 cost advantageous in operating expenditure over Linux

New Delhi, Nov 26 (UNI) Microsoft Windows 2003 environment across enterprises has close to 15.9 per cent advantage over Linux and constitutes lower total cost of ownership (TCO) in 80 per cent of the instances encompassing application servers, network servers, and mail servers.

According to a survey for application servers, Microsoft Windows 2003 has emerged with the lowest TCO which is 22.4 per cent lower than Linux, where as for network servers and mail servers, it is 11 per cent and 8.24 per cent respectively, lower than Linux.

Linux platform offers a TCO advantage of 4.7 per cent in file print server and 24 per cent in web server over Microsoft Windows 2003. However, costs of maintenance and upgrades of file print server for Windows 2003 are lower than the Linux environment.

The TCO consists of the cost incurred by an enterprise in the course of selection (search and evaluation), installation (capital and deployment cost), maintenance and deployment (both planned and 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, roll-out, configuration management, bug-fixing and testing, and module integration.

Interestingly, in India, hardware is the largest component of TCO of Indian enterprises, where software costs are just about 15 per cent of the capital expense and 6 per cent of overall TCO, the recent study on Total Cost of Ownership by leading global growth consulting firm Frost&Sullivan revealed.

Frost&Sullivan India Director - Consulting, ICT practice, Dr T R Madan Mohan said, ''While assessing the TCO, organisations should evaluate the capex and opex of the specific IT investment throughout the life cycle of the asset. More often than not, the focus is just on capex, which leads to skewed decisions. Specifically while comparing proprietary software with open source software, the capex constitutes 53 per cent of the TCO and opex constitutes 47 per cent.'' ''Our analysis shows, while capex for the Linux operating system might be low but the opex could be as much as 53.1 per cent higher as compared to the Windows 2003 operating system, primarily due to the high cost of support and manpower. Hence, it is prudent for an organisation to capture all necessary cost components beyond just the initial cost of acquisition,'' he said Aztecsoft Ltd Chief Information Officer N Nataraj, a key participant in the study said, ''TCO of Linux is greater than that of Windows 2003 server by approximately 20 per cent. With Linux, one has to spend a lot of time in building skilled manpower, which directly impacts the support and maintenance of a Linux eco system.'' The research was conducted on 54 organisations -- both high-end and mid tier-- across BFSI, manufacturing, public sector and government, ITeS, BPO and telecom verticals. The target respondents consisted of senior IT professionals CIOs, CTOs, heads of information technology, general managers -- information technology, senior IT managers, senior system analysts of large and mid-sized enterprises.

Organisations in India are increasingly moving towards having a detailed information policy along with well-defined IT objectives.

Chief information officer (CIOs) have realised that they need analysis that reaches beyond initial purchase costs of a hardware or software, and indicates post-implementation operation, support and maintenance costs as well.

Hence, there is a need to capture the total cost of ownership, the sum total of all direct and indirect costs associated with the life cycle of an IT asset, it said.

With business understanding about IT in most organisations on the rise, Frost &Sullivan foresees that more and more IT professionals will begin taking into account the support costs, application integration costs, performance considerations, and availability of IT skill to implement and maintain a platform before they decide on a particular one.

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