Everyone knows that TCO is a useful metric for capturing the costs of an IT decision over time. But how does your server OS platform contribute to the total cost? And where do the bulk of costs creep into your business?
Initial software costs make up only 7 percent of total cost of ownership.
Did you know...
Staffing—the cost of managing and maintaining IT systems—accounts for 60 percent of TCO.
Downtime is 15 percent of TCO.
These two cost areas are the largest contributors to TCO over three years.
Together, the costs of ongoing management and maintenance, as well as downtime, typically represent 75 percent or more of your total cost of ownership. To successfully reduce TCO, focus on improving system manageability by using mature management tools and consistent processes, and by having well-trained resources.
Here you’ll find best practices for thinking about and managing TCO as well as resources to help clarify how Windows and Linux-based solutions impact your budget in terms of upfront costs, ongoing management costs, and more.
Related Case Studies
Glidepath Glidepath selected Microsoft Windows ServerTM 2003 and immediately experienced significant savings in support costs with no file server down time.
Read the Case Study
Milliman This financial services firm scales fast-growing hedging application on a low-cost cluster. Read the Case Study
Speedy Hire Rental company reduces TCO with switch from Open Source and Linux
Read the Case Study
WebTrends WebTrends' decision to remove Linux and Unix delivers several benefits, including improved alignment with customer needs and low total cost of ownership.
Read the Case Study
Industry Research
IDC For IT professionals: Communicate the business value that IT provides to a company’s operations by focusing on the return on investment (ROI) associated with IT projects.
Read the Report
Keystone Strategy In an analysis of switching costs, this study found that, across a variety of workloads and organization sizes, there are significant costs to migrate between Linux distributions. Read the Report
Mercer Management Consulting Driving Lower TCO and Rapid ROI through UNIX Migrations: IT Decision-Maker Perspectives
Read the Report
Hands On
Calculate the ROI of Microsoft's Integrated Virtualization Offering This tool was developed to educate and empower users to make informed decisions regarding their infrastructure and long-term virtualization investments.
Learn More
CIO Interview
Chip Larouche, City of Lake Oswego: “Folks like to tell me that Linux is free. However, that’s not really the case when you consider I’d have to increase my staff […]”
