'Windows scores over Linux in ownership cost'

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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% and 47% respectively. Our analysis shows that while capex for Linux might be low, the operating expenses could be as much as 53.1% 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% lower than Linux, where as for network servers and mail servers the TCO is 11% and 8.24% lower than Linux respectively.'

According to him, Linux offers TCO advantage of 4.7% in file print server and 24% 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.'

Taken from Business Line

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