Desktop Linux: Novell leads from the front
Published: 19 Apr 2004 11:55 BST
How is it working out winding up the Microsoft licences you do have – are they making that an easy thing for you to do?
It's interesting you ask that -- we just concluded our licences in March. That was our annual contract with Microsoft and we terminated the Microsoft OS and Office enterprise licence.
That was across the entire organisation?
What that means is that for all the OSes I have, I do not have upgrade rights. Now I still have perpetual use for the set number of Microsoft Office clients I purchased.
So I've read that you expect to save about $900,000 (£497,594) from the Microsoft licensing issue but do you think there will be any costs associated with the migration -- around hardware for instance?
As we expand the desktop rollout across the company I expect to find areas of the company that may have equipment that is six years old or more, and I will have to address that, but I don't know if I wouldn't have been upgrading that equipment anyway.
Do you see Novell developing any commercial migration tools of the back of this internal project?
Yes, definitely, and that is happening on the services side too. If you go online right now and look at the offerings from our consulting group, we have a desktop and a server migration offering and they are developing these methodologies based on what we are doing internally.
So from a services perspective do you think you would have been able to go to customers and say 'we'll help you migrate from Windows' if you hadn't done this internally first? Did you really have any choice but to do this?
That's an interesting question. We certainly could have done but we would have partnered with whoever that first customer would have been. But as it is, my role is more than the traditional internal CIO role and it is to often be that first customer whom we think is very important in the whole development process.
So is it possibly to quantify exactly how many of the 5,000-plus users will be running Windows and Office this time next year?
It's very difficult to say as we are a cross-platform provider so we will never get 100 per cent of staff. My measurements are a bit cloudy from that standpoint. But if we are talking about enterprise desktops then hopefully six months on from this October – say mid 2005 then we should have the majority of desktops moved. It will never be that clear cut because you can have some machines that are portioned and running Linux and Windows. Success for me would be in say April 2005 if those people running portioned desktops [with Windows and Linux] were only actually using the Linux portion of their machine.
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