An online retailer has saved more than £56,000 in
software licensing costs after moving its IT platform fromMicrosoft WindowstoLinux.
Iwantoneofthose.com,
an e-business retailer launched in 2000, has moved its
Hewlett-Packard servers, which manage accounting, transaction,
product catalogue and warehouse management, from Windows Server
2003 to Novell's SuSE Linux Enterprise Server.
"Under a Linux environment our server software licensing costs
are a tenth of what it was costing us under Microsoft," said Angus
Gow, programme director at Iwantoneofthose.com.
The business, which employs 50 staff, has also reduced IT staff
costs by £15,000 per head by hiring Linux administrators rather
than Microsoft administrators to manage its servers, said Gow.
As part of the project, the company replaced its
Windows-compatible enterprise resource planning (ERP) system with
an open-source Apache-based ERP system called "Open for
Business".
The older Windows-compatible application, which cost £80,000 in
licensing costs a year, had begun to crash when demand peaked at
Christmas, and could not deal with more than 6,000 orders a day,
said Gow. "By using an open-source ERP system, we also have no
licensing costs," he said.
Moving to a
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server has also enabled the company to
extend the life of the four-year-old servers that were unable to
run newer versions of Windows.
The online retailer has customised the Linux operating system so
that these servers now run in clusters to provide processing
support to its ERP application.
Gow said that Microsoft software is still used on the desktop,
but that in January 2008 the company would also begin a review to
look at migrating to open source alternatives.