While I support the general notion of your statement, I have to correct some facts:
- The recurring costs for licence upgrades are said to be 2.8 Mio Euros every 3 - 4 years. However, there are other cost factors that need to be taken into account: migration and training costs for the new windows and office versions and cost that are now saved since they took the opportunity to unify some of their document management. That's not 10 mio pounds per year, but still a sizable amount.
- In the original document, no amount is given for the cost savings for the hardware that's not replaced.
- There are no statistics given for the number of support queries in terms of linux vs. windows. There is anecdotical evidence but they response explicitly states that full and valid statistics will only be available in two years. The number cited is the total number of support queries for the linux workstations over time. It is cited as proof that the pain points from the beginning of the migrations have been resolved and that the number of support queries is dropping sharply even though the number of linux workstations is rising. The number is also said to include all kinds of errors, including network, server and database errors.
Still, the cost savings are totalled at somewhere around 3.8 Mio Euro for the whole period and since most of the up-front investments have been done now the number can be expected to rise. It's not as huge as you make it sound, but it's still big. And most importantly its a proof that this can be done without disrupting everything.
- The recurring costs for licence upgrades are said to be 2.8 Mio Euros every 3 - 4 years. However, there are other cost factors that need to be taken into account: migration and training costs for the new windows and office versions and cost that are now saved since they took the opportunity to unify some of their document management. That's not 10 mio pounds per year, but still a sizable amount.
- In the original document, no amount is given for the cost savings for the hardware that's not replaced.
- There are no statistics given for the number of support queries in terms of linux vs. windows. There is anecdotical evidence but they response explicitly states that full and valid statistics will only be available in two years. The number cited is the total number of support queries for the linux workstations over time. It is cited as proof that the pain points from the beginning of the migrations have been resolved and that the number of support queries is dropping sharply even though the number of linux workstations is rising. The number is also said to include all kinds of errors, including network, server and database errors.
Still, the cost savings are totalled at somewhere around 3.8 Mio Euro for the whole period and since most of the up-front investments have been done now the number can be expected to rise. It's not as huge as you make it sound, but it's still big. And most importantly its a proof that this can be done without disrupting everything.
(most numbers taken from the original statement at http://www.muenchen.de/rathaus/dms/Home/Stadtinfos/Presse-Se...)