Examples of easy ways to save on operational costs...

1. Leverage the Internet to replace costly leased lines and frame relay connexions.

You have a number of choices and chosing the right one depends on the applications, your risk profile, your users' needs and operational capabilities. We can help you make this assessment and come up with a deployment plan. For example, should you:

Use an SSL secured Portal and tunneled TCP?

Use IPSec?

Use L2TP?

Use PPPoE?

2. Replace all the different user databases (HR, Time Sheet, Problem Tracking, Email, etc. - there's probably 20 of these in your organization) with one, Open Standards LDAP based, solution that

Eliminates entitlement creep

Better security by removing zombie accounts

Productivity gains by not having to remember all those passwords

Significant reduction in administration costs

3. Deploy a Secure Portal

Get rid of the modem pool

No more long distance phone bills

Intranet access from Internet Cafés and Hotels

Secure WiFi access from Airports and Starbucks

Track application usage

Enable telecommuter access on snow days

4. Eliminate the Microsoft Tax¹²

StarOffice 6 or OpenOffice (differences) from $59.99 (retail) to $25 (site license) to $0 (Open Source) compared to an entry in a 290 line spreadsheet, but it looks like around $200 or so for M$Office. If you don't need that database or the Asian character sets you can save $200 per PC or $20,000 for 100 Desktops.

StarOffice/OpenOffice installs on a server, ASP style. So when you need to upgrade you upgrade the server (once) instead of all 100 Pcs. At $100 a visit that's $10,000 right there.

Operating System. There's Debian ($0), Solaris ($99) or Windows (guessing $154, $124 for an upgrade from NT + $124 for maintenance). Maybe another $30,000 saving for 100 desktops.

Walmart is selling a 1.1GHz PC with Debian Linux (Lindows™) preinstalled for $199.98. You might be able to strike a deal with Microtel for 100 desktops that is close. That's $200 less than Dell's cheapest at $399. Another $20,000, although perhaps given that Unix/Linux typically requires less horsepower than M$Windows for the same performance perhaps you can recycle your older machines and do your bit for the environment too.

Net you saved about $40,000 to $50,000 (Dell bundles XP with the PC) and more than $10,000 every time you upgrade (Sun hasn't been charging for upgrades, and of course neither Debian nor OpenOffice will do so either).

How about other administrative costs? It could be argued that administration is far simpler with Unix style systems. Generally you can access the machine remotely even if the windowing system is hosed and do some kind of diagnostic and reboot (rare unlike some O/S we could name). Package management (dpkg) is robust and consistent – no DLL Hell.

Other applications? There are 7500 applications at Debian (free) and Lindows ($99 for all of them – one click installation).

We can provide you with an upgrade plan, ROI estimate, and training and you can get your costs under control.

5. Server Consolidation

There's absolutely no reason to have dozens of servers providing email, file, print, and authentication services – each using valuable real estate, eating power and air conditioning, adding failure points (10 disk drives have a much shorter MTTF than one mirrored pair), requiring administration, patches, upgrades, UPS services, backups – the list is endless.

Use SAMBA or PC-Netlink® to provide legacy file and print services until all those old PCs have been replaced with new Linux based ones.

Eliminate those funky M$ protocols and use industry standards.

There's only one way to find out if we can answer your questions - email us at answers@apogeect.com and we'll get back to you asap.

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