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
Johns Hopkins Institutions Johns Hopkins found that the Linux and UNIX monitoring and management application was two to three times more expensive than the cost of monitoring those systems natively through the Microsoft solution. Read the Case Study
NowDocs To cut costs and grow its business in the software-as-a-service market, NowDocs switched from a Linux and Oracle platform to Windows-based solutions. Read the Case Study
Earth Class Mail Online Postal Mail Service Saves $750,000 with Move from Linux to Windows and .NET. Read the Case Study
Beijing Software Testing & QA Center BSTQC upgraded its render farm to Windows HPC Server 2008 and increased performance by 15 percent, reduced costs, and improved customer service.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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 […]”
