Hard cash, cold logic: Linux

But why Suse Linux? To begin with, Elcot found that the Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop matched and surpassed the Windows OS where ease of use was concerned.

But initially, Elcot thought that half their desktops should be commissioned with Red Hat and other half with Suse.

Later, because of its user-friendly interface and backed by popular demand, users decided to migrate to Suse Linux en-masse.

"Our aim was to migrate to Linux and not a particular version of Linux. We had issues with Red Hat in certain areas. Ubuntu has only Gnome at the front end.

We wanted KDE too, as it closely matches the traditional Windows XP environment. To migrate from Windows to Linux this was essential," Umashankar says.

And, he says, Suse does not require a technical person to install since everything is automatic and front-end driven and device drivers are detected automatically.

Initially, Umashankar says, they had some issues with an existing procurement application that was developed in ASP. It wouldn't work under Mozilla Firefox.

Umashankar's solution was simple, "We got the coding changed to work on Mozilla Firefox. Problem fixed."

Nothing Beats A Good Price

As much fun as it was to fiddle with Linux, it wasn't fun that drove Umashankar's decision to switch platforms.

Before he become an Indian Administrative Services officer, Umashankar spent time at three nationalized banks. He also served as the district collector of Tiruvarur (a district in Tamil Nadu) for two years, during which all the taluks under his jurisdiction achieved an over 85 percent score on paperless automation. This included modules for land record administration, national old age pension schemes and agricultural laborers' insurance.

Umashankar knew his IT and he knew the financial burden it put on the government.

The decision to migrate to Linux was driven primarily by cost. It was hard to escape the cold figures before Umashankar: Elcot saved Rs 5 crore on every 20 servers it set up with Linux. And they had over 1,800 servers.

In addition, Umashankar says that the shift saves them about 25 percent on any general hardware purchases -- and as much as 90 percent on the high-end servers.

Umashankar says that his office uses the Openoffice.org suite. This saves them close to Rs 12,000 on each desktop, he says.

"We buy Intel dual core desktops with 19" TFT monitors for Rs 21,600 including the Linux OS. If we bought a proprietary office suite at Rs 12,000 for each desktop, the cost of commissioning infrastructure would go up to Rs 33,600 -- a 55 percent increase," he says.

And when you have to refresh over 30,000 PCs, that's a figure that can add up: to about Rs 17 crore.

And that's not all. These figures don't take into account software upgrades for applications. By using the free Openoffice.org suite and a Linux OS, Elcot has bypassed yearly licensing fees for proprietary software.