Surrey County Council is to embark on a £1m standardisation
on Novell infrastructure which will see it save £1.6m a
year.
John Edwards, head of technical services at Surrey Council, said
the savings - equivalent to 42% of his IT budget - would come from
moving from a mixed NT and Netware set-up to a single operating
environment.
He said the reduced complexity of a common infrastructure, as well
as some of the remote-working features in Netware, would help cut
costs over the course of the three-year deal.
Edwards said, "When I was interviewed for the post I said I could
save 30% for technical services. I was given the target of 42%,
which we hope to achieve by restructuring technical services in the
council."
The split legacy environment resulted from when the council ran on
two systems - social services on NT and the rest on Novell. The
entire infrastructure is planned for migration to Netware 6 by the
third quarter of 2003.
Edwards said savings will come partly from standardisation but also
from some of the "bells and whistles" to be found in Novell's
software. He highlighted Novell's remote management features and
said Novell's directory "seems to work better" than Microsoft's
offering.
A review is planned for two years time, at which point the
department will assess whether to continue with Novell.