Government IT Bills Cut By Open Source

The UK government’s new open source procurement mandate has allowed the achievement of real cost savings, claims hosting company Memset.

The guideline, explained in the new Government Service Design Manual, states that public sector organisations must now demonstrate that open source choices have been included in their procurement activities.

The company say that 40% of the cost of running a cloud-based high-traffic web application serving content to citizens will be made up of VMware licensing fees.

However, it says if these organisations were to use open source alternatives such as Xen, these running costs will be significantly lower.

The firm claims that it would charge the government £140,000 less over a three year period if they were to use Xen rather than VMware.

“With the UK government’s £200m spend on Microsoft licensing since 2010 proving to be the headline example of the huge cost of software licenses to the UK public sector, we can prove there are further savings that can be achieved from the infrastructure side of things as well,” claimed Robin Pape, Memset public sector advisor.

“We want to educate and raise awareness of the benefits of open source – but more importantly we want public sector organisations to know that just because they are using VMware or other proprietary software for their infrastructure, this shouldn’t stop them from migrating.

“The cost savings are large enough to consider making the move to an open source alternative like Xen,” he added.

The firm claims that public services can avoid vendor lock-in by making the switch, as well as achieving better scalability, reliability, agility and security for their unique business needs.

© 24N.biz