Wednesday, July 06, 2005

Goodbye Microsoft and Red Hat, Hello Novell and ROI

If you're a county goverment tasked with providing services for half a million citizens—and you have a very finite number of taxpayer dollars to do it—you're going to want to make the most of your limited IT budget. It's not surprising then that Jefferson County, Colorado was looking at Linux and open source applications to serve its 3,500 employees in 46 locations in the Denver metro area.

Jefferson County was already running quite a bit of Linux (mostly Red Hat) and the Novell team in Denver saw an opportunity. Lead by Dan Webster, Named Account Executive, and Mike Friesenegger, Network & Systems Specialist, the team worked with the county to create a major win, both for the citizens of Colorado and for Novell.

Jefferson County will run many of its core applications on Novell SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 9, including its Electronic Data Management System, Remedy and Oracle applications. The county selected Novell GroupWise over Microsoft Exchange for collaboration and is running the GroupWise Linux client on SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server. Moving to Linux has helped Jefferson County reduce its hardware costs by 50 percent, by replacing large UNIX servers with Intel hardware. The county also reduced its software costs nearly 30 percent with open source products.


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