New South Wales, Australia, Heading Toward Linux
The NSW Office of State Revenue plans to migrate to OpenOffice and Linux desktops for its 600 employees.
“[Manager of Client Services Pravash] Babhoota said the emergence of a new version of Microsoft Windows, Office and their commensurate licensing would naturally lead his IT shop to consider consolidating its applications on open source.
“At this stage the benefits have been in delivering [savings through] consolidation and thin clients. In a few more months the focus will shift to replacing Office,” Babhoota said…
“As soon as support ends for XP, we will look at moving to Linux [desktops],” Babhoota said, adding the back-end switch to open source had cost 17 percent of what a proprietary upgrade had been costed at, with the agency doubling the amount of business it processed in the same 12-month period.”