Council says it will save 60 per cent in software costs

Bristol City Council is expecting to save 60 per cent in software costs over five years by ditching Microsoft Office for Sun StarOffice.

The council wanted to streamline its mixed environment of Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect and Microsoft Office, where time was wasted converting documents and dealing with various versions of products.

It considered standardising on Microsoft Office, but decided costs were too high following changes to Microsoft’s volume licensing terms that removes upgrade rights and introduces Software Assurance.

The council has calculated that the total cost of ownership – including staff retraining, migration and support costs of moving 5,500 users - for Microsoft Office over five years would be £1.7m compared to £670,000 for StarOffice.

Gavin Beckett, Bristol City Council’s IT strategy manager, said: ‘Each MS Office licence was 12 times more expensive than the equivalent StarOffice licence for the public sector.'

'This isn’t the case in education, where the Academic licence is only three times as much, but Microsoft wouldn’t or couldn’t extend this to us,' he said.

Beckett says the biggest challenge was encouraging staff to be open-minded about anything that wasn’t Microsoft Office.

‘We had to face a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt, do a lot of listening and show people what StarOffice could do before they began to relax,' he said.

The council, a partner in the Open Source Academy which encourages local authorities to make more use of open source software, erred on the pessimistic side when evaluating support and training costs.

‘We now have concrete evidence that less effort is required to deploy the software, support and train user than we estimated,’ said Beckett.