Open Source Scores in ELCOT

Meanwhile, in his office, Umashankar had other problems. Like many pioneers, his vision held good only where his voice reached. By the first week of June 2006, Umashankar started moving Elcot's desktops to Suse Linux OS. The entire organization followed in phases, and slowly at first. The migration of over 200 desktops at Elcot's HQ took just over eight months. As users caught on with Umashankar's infectious enthusiasm, they started getting more familiar with the features of their new OS. Soon a cycle of interest developed and users found new ways of switching mail clients to work on Suse 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. 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."

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. By using the free Openoffice. org suite and a Linux OS, Elcot has bypassed yearly licensing fees for proprietary software. A corollary benefit is that the government no longer needs to procure additional hardware required to run upgraded versions of most proprietary software.

"Due to our experience in the last 18 months, our trust in Linux has gone up," Umashankar says. And so has the trust of Elcot's vendors, he says. "One of our vendors who produces banners and pamphlets suffered a severe setback because a virus attacked them on the eve of a large event hosted by Elcot. In the end, we had to make our own arrangements through another vendor." He recalls how despite anti-virus updates, all their vendor's systems including their CEO's laptop was corrupted. "Elcot has given them an ultimatum: either switch to  a dependable system like Linux or lose Elcot's business," says Umashankar. Elcot experience might just be one pebble in the pond, but it's making its splash felt.

The Person Behind It

C. Umasankar Managing Director,

Elcot

“If we bought a proprietary office suite for each desktop, the cost of infrastructure would go up by 55 percent.”