Higher Education Ponders the Open Source Equation

New Research Weighs Costs, Risks, Trade-Offs

Faced with rapidly changing electronic campuses, at least a quarter of all U.S. higher education institutions will replace major business systems before the start of the 2005 academic year, according to a survey by Educause’s Center for Applied Research. This may be one of several reasons why officials at U.S. colleges and universities are reviewing policies and tightening campus management systems as they try to stay competitive in the race for new students, alumni support and grant money.

To that end, many officials are considering noncommercial software as a way to manage technology costs and give themselves more control over future applications and systems.

But in looking ahead, campus IT and business administrators can benefit from focusing on deploying and managing open source software, according to several new studies on the trade-offs between open source and commercial software.

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Total Cost of Ownership

For some campus IT organizations, open source software’s promised savings in hardware and maintenance costs can be tempting, especially in brand-new implementations.

But such environments, free from the mixed hardware, standards and spaghetti code typical of the IT environment, are rare at colleges and universities. Instead, campus IT environments can be a hodgepodge of systems and software. For most campus administrators, the call of open source needs to be met with a more detailed reckoning of the costs, risks and facts associated with open source investments.

Are resources being devoted to what the school does best? Or are officials pursuing time-consuming projects, such as developing business applications from open source code, which they might not be well suited to? In fact, although suitable for some, open source efforts may actually increase financial and business risk at large and mixed-platform organizations, according to a report from Forrester Research Ltd.

Of those organizations Forrester analysts studied that had detailed metrics, Linux was 5 to 20 percent more expensive than their Microsoft environments.

Other research firms weighed in on the cost question this year. In an April 2004 study of 1,000 IT administrators, Yankee Group analysts found that “in large enterprises, a significant Linux deployment or total switch from Windows to Linux would be three to four times more expensive and take three times as long to deploy as an upgrade from one version of Windows to newer Windows releases.”

In their most surprising revelation, Yankee Group researchers said “more than 90 percent of the 300 large enterprises with 10,000 or more end users indicated a significant or total switch from Windows to Linux would be prohibitively expensive, extremely complex and time-consuming, and would not provide any tangible business gains for the organization.”

Why such a dramatic variance in expenditures for software whose most popular selling point is cost? The main reason why the promise versus reality of total lifecycle costs varies so much is that commercial software companies such as Microsoft “shift the burden of maintenance, upgrades and support away from internal IT,” Forrester analysts said. When customers pay, costs can rise dramatically.

Key lifecycle costs and issues to consider:

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Coming Full Circle

Microsoft supports access to software code and permits its licensed commercial use. Two established company programs demonstrate its focus in this area—the Government Security Program and the Shared Source Initiative are complimented by a new effort called the Sharing Solutions Network (SSN).

This most recent effort is a global initiative that provides an online, community-based capability to promote increased communication, deeper information exchange, and collaboration between government organizations, academic institutions and other public sector agencies.

By forging such links and providing customers what they ask for, Microsoft will continue to produce software solutions that deliver value to higher education institutions around the world.

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