Australia cuts Microsoft bill by AU$100m
CTO John Sheridan wonders why anyone would upgrade Office again
Posted in Management, 17th February 2013 21:49 GMT
Free whitepaper – Hands on with Hyper-V 3.0 and virtual machine movement
Australia has reduced the amount of money it pays for Microsoft products by AU$100m (£66m, $103m), according to the nation's Chief Technology Officer John Sheridan.
Speaking yesterday at the Kickstart conference, Sheridan explained that consolidating contracts from 42 to one and working through a single reseller has enabled the savings. One contract now covers 300,000 devices and 260,000 people across 126 entities. Work has begun on negotiations for the successor contract with Redmond.
Sheridan did not say what savings he expects or hopes for that deal, but said cutting costs further by using open source software is not his preferred tactic, as big bang upgrades are costly and complex. A mandated replacement for Office may also hamper innovation and productivity, he opined, pointing to the presentation he created in the free iOS graphics app Haiku Deck.
Sheridan used the app to create a witty slide deck featuring Lego minifigures in quaint poses, but said it is not yet reasonable to expect that public servants will bring their own devices, do their work with apps and save the government some cash.
“BYOD does not have a lot of applicability for riflemen or Centrelink counter staff,” he said, hosing down the notion that all Commonwealth employees could be BYOD candidates. Sheridan likes the idea of cheap apps selected and sourced by staff being used widely across the public service, but just how bring your own device would work is yet to be determined.
“What if a worker does BYOD and their device breaks?” he asked. Would that worker be responsible for coming to work with a working device? Would the Commonwealth be expected to have backup devices? Those processes are yet to be considered, he said, and BYOD for the Commonwealth is therefore not yet feasible.
Sheridan also pointed to other savings the Australian Government Information Management Office's (AGIMO) revised procurement practices have brought about. Before that work commenced, Sheridan said the Commonwealth paid 54 per cent above the Australian average price for PCs. Today it pays 49 per cent below that average, with savings of $27m banked. Telepresence has saved $44m in travel costs since 2009.
Sheridan said vendor culture has also changed as a result of the purchasing panel arrangements. ISPs, he said, used to offer a capacity upgrade when their contracts expired. Now they offer that and a price cut.
“We regularly see savings in excess of 50 per cent,” he said. “They understand government wont be renewing contracts just because it is too hard to move.” ®
Free whitepaper – Hands on with Hyper-V 3.0 and virtual machine movement
COMMENTS
What savings can they expect to see...
...by publicly announcing "we will not consider any alternative vendors." Hmm...
Re: Free Is Good
I think you might miss a point.
{LO|AOO} !== MSO.
IT is odd in the modern world in that there is a ridiculous near monopoly maintained world wide.
Imagine if your car had to be a Ford and painted black, unless you were one of those identical rugged individualists who run their white coloured Fords on very expensive hot air or your were a beardie who distils their own fuel for their ...
Well you get the idea. It is insane that we as members of a global society allow such restrictions to flourish and even encourage them through ignorance, laziness or whatever excuse we don't even bother to conceive of because that is the status quo.
With your answer you indicate - to me at least - that you are the kind of person who can't be arsed to think for yourself and are happy to live in this sad state of affairs.
Nice use of sarcasm though.
Cheers
Jon
Re: Free Is Good
And free of formatting would be even better. It seems that the formatting takes considerable precedence over content. Once upon a time government documents were judged on their content, now it seems that is less the case, and I for one would like to see text files mandated for all government use. Yes, I'm serious. It's time to get rid of all those amateur typesetter wannabes.
So how much are they paying?
Were they paying 101m before the cut or 1bn? Because 100m sounds like more than enough to throw at devs to add whatever's missing from Libre Office and give it a polish, and you'd only have to pay it once.
Hey, why not ask around, maybe there's a few other governments that would be interested in drastically reducing their Software spend by sharing the dev costs, with enough partners you might even get commitments down into the single millions.
Yes, I am aware of the numerous reasons this will never happen, and also that even if it did happen it would become an almighty train wreak, but it's still annoying to see money pissed away year in year out because the people in charge of spending it are without exception, a bunch of fucking muppets.
Re: Free Is Good
LO might not be quite there yet but my Missus works for an "org" that has shed loads of MS Publisher docs and she needed to work on them on a Mac, after faffing about with VMs and Wine installs, enter LibreOffice 4! Loaded the manky old Pub docs in perfectly formatted. LO might not be a perfect substitute just yet, I know it has some niggles but it's certainly helping people with old doc formats that MS couldn't give a rat's arse about any more!
Hate to break to you FOSS haters but there are some out here who simply want to get work done and are not looking to replace the latest MSO with the latest OO/LO, due to lack of money or bad decisions made by precessors in certains jobs, FOSS is helping to keep the world ticking over and keep people working.
The new Office:
