Friday, October 23, 2009

Cos switch to open source technologies to cut costs

NEW DELHI: Indian enterprises, private and public, are opening up to saving costs by using free for use technologies. Governments, institutionsand companies are increasingly turning to open source technologies to turn frugal as these softwares, hardwares and applications
are often free but also to avoid falling into the trap of a proprietary IT environment.

While commercial software vendors disagree with open source providers, support is often cheaper in the open source environment.Take for instance, the Rs 550-crore Sheela Foam, that makes Sleepwell brand of mattresses. After implementing open source, Pertish Mankotia, IT head at Sheela Foam, seems to be enjoying a nice sleep, despite the economic downturn.

“Our maintenance costs have dropped to one-sixth as we migrated to an open source based system in April, this year,” he said. Sheela Foam has about 3,000 dealers, 1,000 employees and 70 distributors connected via IT systems across the country.

“We invested only about Rs 8 lakh (Rs 4 lakh for a Dell server). We will incur a saving of Rs 50 lakh, because of a migration from a proprietary software to an open ERP solution running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) on Dell X86 servers,” says Mankotia.

read more....

No comments: