A Microsoft Enterprise licence agreement has allowed the
local authority in Bergen, Norway - an open source software user -
to run a supported version of the latest Windows server
software.
In June Bergen said it was heading down the open source route and
that it planned to ditch its Unix and Windows applications platform
for Novell's SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8.
Any move to Linux where access to Windows servers is also needed
requires a Microsoft client access licence - a cost that can make
open source uneconomical.
But Ole-Bjorn Tuftedal, chief technology officer at Bergen, said
the council avoided Windows licence expenditure thanks to its
Microsoft Enterprise agreement.
Tuftedal's three-year Microsoft Enterprise agreement expired in
2003, at the same time Microsoft was rolling out server updates
such as Windows 2003 and Exchange 2003. This allowed Tuftedal to
upgrade to the latest versions through his Enterprise agreement
without any additional licensing costs.
This strategy has allowed the city to move to a Windows platform
that would be supported for several years while it continues to
roll out Linux. Tuftedal's Linux strategy is based around SuSE
rather than Red Hat, which was also evaluated.
The implementation is expected to be used by 50,000 staff. Twenty
Oracle database servers running HP-UX, which power the city's
health and welfare applications, will be replaced by HP Integrity
Itanium 64-bit servers running SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8.
Novell offers its Netware users a migration path to SuSE
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