Sacrebleu! The French Police Save Millions with Ubuntu!

Written on March 13, 2009  |  by RP Mickler  |  Leave a Comment  | 

Arstechnica is reporting that the French Police are in the process of migrating away from the Microsoft Windows platform in favor of an open source alternative, Ubuntu. France’s Gendarmerie Nationale, the country’s national police force, has saved millions of dollars since 2004 on over 5,000 workstations; the organization said that it plans to migrate a remaining 15,000 workstations to Ubuntu by the end of the year.

According to Wikipedia, Ubuntu (an African word meaning “Humanity to Others”) is the most popular Linux distribution (“distro”) capturing well over 30-percent of all Linux desktops in 2007.  It comes in two editions: a workstation and a server edition – and is totally free.

Further, the police force has found additional savings in open source application adoption through ditching Microsoft Office in favor of OpenOffice, ThunderBird, and FireFox.

The strategy has allowed the French police to cut annual IT spend by 70-percent – up to 50 million Euros on licensing and maintenance since 2004. Literally, it’s not all fun and games for the Gendarmerie Nationale:

“Moving from Microsoft XP to Vista would not have brought us many advantages and Microsoft said it would require training of users,” said Lt. Col. Guimard. “Moving from XP to Ubuntu, however, proved very easy. The two biggest differences are the icons and the games. Games are not our priority.”

Obviously! But saving money – without a loss of capability – through creative IT strategy apparently is! Just another case study on how an open approach to IT management lends to big savings and even bigger returns.

R