| Savings Due to OpenOffice Take Shape |
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| Written by Jeffrey G. Causey | |
| Thursday, 10 November 2005 | |
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Late in September and early October, I reported on some potential savings through the use of the OpenOffice 2.0 office suite/OpenDocument format instead of Microsoft Office/proprietary Office document formats. A new article came out yesterday (Nov. 9th) in the UK edition of ZDNet concerning a decision by the French tax agency(the equivalent of the IRS I think) to deploy OpenOffice to all of their desktops. The nice thing about this latest article is the cost information included that helps quantify potential savings. In this case, the tax agency had an estimate that upgrading from Office 97 to Office XP would cost about $34.6M. With 80,000 desktops impacted, this comes out to a cost of about $433 per PC. Since most PC's that can be acquired at government prices for a standard desktop are going to run less than $1,000, this means you would have to spend an amount equal to about half the investment in the physical hardware just to have an Office suite (pretty basic) available for employees. Keep in mind this calculation only covers the upgrade from Office 97 to Office XP. We do not yet know how much the next version of Office will cost, but it will probably be comparable. In contrast, deploying OpenOffice to all 80,000 desktops will only cost about $235,000 or $2.94 per PC. Yes, you read that correctly - less than $3 per computer to deploy a solid, world-class office suite. Needless to say, the scale of possible savings is truly amazing. As officials in the article noted, in addition to these cost savings, they will also achieve other benefits like avoid the cost of upgrade cycles, ensuring data and documents are in a standard file format, and avoiding vendor lock-in. I hope you are already trying out OpenOffice for your organization. If not and you would like to discuss potential benefits in more detail, just get in touch with me. If you are considering or have already deployed OpenOffice, I'd like to hear from you as well about what you learned through the process. Jeffrey G. Causey |
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