The ever increasing cost of licenses, especially with the growth of our user base and our business reliability on technology, forced us to look at alternative technologies, driven by Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), security, stability and scalability, as the measures of evaluating the alternatives.

This was not an easy task, as there are not too many alternatives out there. In 1998, we organized the first Linux training for our staff, and became converts to the adaptation of Linux in our environment.

We started analyzing the TCO of Linux in comparison to Windows from available user/business applications, to licensing cost, human resources, hardware implications and long-term direction. By 2001, we were convinced that we had a winner. We put together a plan and presented it to the President of our company, we got the “go ahead” and started our project in late 2001.

We have trained our existing staff and setup a lab environment to simulate the migration of W2K servers to Linux with the help of IBM professional services. All solutions were tested and verified in our lab before going into production environment. In December 2002, we completed our pilot project by converting all of our Head Office W2K servers (4) to Linux. Building on this success, we have started our rollout plan to a kingdom wide conversion of all Windows 2000 servers to Linux Redhat 7.3 servers. (We are testing Redhat 8 in our labs). All servers will be migrated by end of Q1’03 marking the end of our phase I of this project.

Parallel to the rollout, our team is working on evaluating “OpenOffice” and Sun’s “StarOffice 6.0” to replace Microsoft Office applications. We plan on making a decision by end of Q2’03, and a rollout plan to be completed by end of 2003. The desktop issue will be tackled in 2004.