Ground breaking software decision to save Council 60%

Bristol City Council is set to save 60 per cent on software costs over five years following its decision to switch from Microsoft Office to Sun's StarOffice.

The decision was taken following a full evaluation of the costs and benefits of both platforms that included staff retraining, migration and support costs of switching the 5,500 users from a mixture of predominantly Microsoft systems to StarOffice.

The council had identified a need to simplify the mixed environment of Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect and Microsoft Office. Too much time was spent on converting documents, even for internal sharing, and without a corporate licensing agreement there were many versions of each product in use. Many of these tools did not support the newer features of Microsoft Office, and this made collaborating with partners more difficult.

The obvious solution was to standardise on Microsoft Office, but the decision by Microsoft to make changes to its volume licensing terms, removing upgrade rights and introducing Software Assurance, significantly increased costs for Bristol Council and provided an opportunity, and another incentive, to explore the other options available.

Ultimately the decision was made to move over to Sun's StarOffice office suite. Not only was this a key win for the supporters of 'open source' software (OSS), it also closed the door to the dreaded vendor lock-in that plagues some of its 'closed source' counterparts. Such proprietary software is upgraded and updated regularly, requiring other vendors to have to continually play catch up to ensure continued interoperability. This places pressure on users to remain with the proprietary software and pay for upgrades frequently. OSS uses an Open Standard format which makes the development of compatible products simple and interoperability is guaranteed by design, thus reducing costs in the long term.

The attraction of OSS came in various forms. Gavin Beckett, Bristol City Council's IT strategy manager, explained: "Clearly the cost of procuring Microsoft Office for the whole council was a major reason for our interest in low-cost or freely licensed software.

"We knew that the council would have to find a large amount of money to invest in the migration project from the mixed environment to a new standard. If the standard product also came with a high purchase cost, we would find it very difficult, or even impossible, to find the budget for it. If we could provide a good quality office suite within existing budgets, and invest in staff training and support at the same time, that had to be a better solution.

"Our biggest challenge was encouraging staff to be open-minded about anything that wasn't MS Office. Microsoft has become so dominant and ubiquitous that the default assumption for many people is that everything else is inferior and that the only way to accomplish work is to do it in the exact way that an MS Office product does it. When you combine this with the idea of software that doesn't cost money, you end up with comments like 'if it's cheap it must be nasty'."

Gavin Beckett believed that part of the solution to this problem was to provide some peace of mind for his users: "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.

"Sun Microsystems was very supportive during this process, and I think the council needed the reassurance of a big IT vendor behind the product. They worked with us on a large-scale pilot in the local housing offices, and put in lots of engineering resources to follow-up and fix the issues we found."

Although Beckett identified that cost was only one of many issues to be considered in the business plan, the 'total cost of ownership' (TCO) was a key factor that affected the decision. It was obvious that StarOffice was a compelling solution: "Clearly, having weighed up all the relevant costs, we decided that the TCO of StarOffice was lower than Microsoft Office, otherwise we wouldn't have recommended the Council adopt it."

When organisations are considering moving over to OSS, support and training are typically identified as the key costs involved in a migration. Bristol needed to consider these factors too: "It was difficult to be certain about some of the costs relating to support and training, so we erred on the pessimistic side, assuming that StarOffice would involve higher costs and that existing Microsoft Office users would not require any training at all. You could say that we stacked the deck in favour of Microsoft Office to reflect users views. Despite this approach, we found that the TCO calculations favoured StarOffice."

Including implementation costs (migration, training, support, etc.) over a five-year period, the TCO for Microsoft Office would be £1.7m and StarOffice £670,000.

"So far, the experience of migrating users has proved that the cost of migration is low and ease of use is high. We now have concrete evidence that less effort is required to deploy the software, support and train users than we estimated," said Gavin Beckett.

In large organisations, such as Bristol, it is not uncommon for there to be fierce competition between different vendors to win the contract. Beckett continued: "Clearly, Microsoft didn't want to lose out to Sun, and they were very keen to persuade us that we should choose MS Office as our new standard. We met with them and discussed the concerns we had, around cost and lock-in, and listened to their point of view. They tried very hard to convince us that every penny we spent with them could result in greater savings from efficiencies down the road. Ultimately, although Microsoft were able to show us the best way to procure licences at the lowest cost under the nationally agreed OGC terms, they simply did not respond to our key point - that 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."

Beckett, along with Bristol's head of ICT, Stewart Long, were keen to ensure that every step of the process was conducted with the utmost care and attention to keep the proposal on track: "The cross-department working group I chaired took care to consider all the objections and concerns, to investigate them and provide answers, and to build consensus at all levels of management. Stewart and I met with Bristol's corporate management team on three occasions to ensure that all of their questions were answered.

"Once the corporate management team had approved the proposal we sought and received political endorsement from our executive member - the council equivalent of a minister. Our business case was centred on the costs and savings rather than the wider open standards issues, and ultimately this proved compelling."

The Bristol case study has been a superb example of a migration performed sensibly. It is clear that a great degree of patience and time has been taken to ensure that the research, proposals, migration and re-training is as smooth and supportive as possible.

Another impressive aspect in this particular case study is that Bristol City Council, as one of the partners in the Open Source Academy (OSA), has worked to produce a number of supporting documents and research papers that detail the lessons they learned.

"We had to break new ground in so many areas; building the business case, evaluating the software, designing the deployment and migration plan, assessing the scale and kind of training needed and so on. My goal for the Open Source Academy resource packs was to make it quick and easy for other Councils to make confident decisions and implement StarOffice or OpenOffice.org effectively" said Beckett.

OSA, which was established to encourage local authorities to make more use of open source software (OSS), is funded under the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister's (ODPM) e-Innovations programme. The ODPM wants to see greater competition in the software market, and has tasked OSA to provide answers to local authorities on the use of OSS and its interoperability and integration with the omnipresent proprietary systems currently dominant in the sector.

Bristol has not only developed a sound migratory path, but documented the process, providing feature comparisons, business cases and more for the benefit of other organisations in similar positions. The documents can be viewed on the OSA website: www.opensourceacademy.gov.uk/osacademy/our_partners/bristol-city-council/bristol-city-council

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Notes to editors:

* Open Source Academy is a partnership of local authorities and organisations with experience in the open source world, funded under the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister's e-Innovations programme. Members of the consortium include Birmingham City Council, Cheshire County Council, Bristol City Council, Shepway District Council, University of Kent, Open Forum Europe (OFE), National Computing Centre (NCC), Society of IT Management (SOCITM) and te of IT Training (IITT). www.opensourceacademy.gov.uk

* Open Forum Europe (OFE) is not-for-profit, independent of any organisation and was launched in March 2002 to accelerate, broaden and strengthen the use of OSS in business and government. OFE pursues the vision of an open, competitive European IT market by 2010 in line with the European Commission i2010 Strategy with the mission of facilitating open competitive choice for IT users. OFE is supported by major IT suppliers and works closely with the European Commission and National Governments both direct and via National Associates. It also undertakes contracts designed to strengthen the development and use of OSS in Europe and has built a comprehensive portal focused on UK Local Government and SME's in Denmark, Ireland and the UK. www.openforumeurope.org

For further information please contact Michael Hardware, Chelgate Limited, on 020 7939 7939 or 07775 925 274 or meh@chelgate.com.