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Tuesday, August 5, 2008, 11:30 am - 12:30 pm
Speaker:
Michael Wenig, Director, HP.
Assessing TCO for FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) differentiates itself from the regular TCO evaluation for commercial software. The benefits from the lack of traditional license costs need to be weighted against potential higher implementation costs and the incremental overhead for governance. Other factors like the length of the evaluation period can greatly impact the outcome of any TCO comparison between FOSS and commercial software in the favor of FOSS. The introduction of commercial open source further complicates any comparative financial analysis. Building a model that fully assesses all cost factors of migrating to FOSS or building new solutions using FOSS is non-trivial.
Hewlett-Packard has created a methodology that can be used to assist in TCO and ROI evaluations involving open source software. This methodology has been used to enable business decision making when comparing open source against commercial alternatives. It is application driven and considers both direct and indirect cost factors like hardware, software licensing, training and support. The model assesses less visible transition costs, like the potential impact on corporate revenue and employee productivity.
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