Especially in the current cost conscious economy TCO is top of mind for most C-level executives.The IT desktop infrastructure is certainly an area to look for potential cost saving opportunities. Given the upcoming migration costs involving Windows 7 and Office 2010, this is the time for companies to look to unlock themselves toward an open desktop infrastructure and save on licensing and ongoing labor costs.
Many of the strategies listed below are modeled in an online TCO calculator at http://www.compariv.com/lotusonredhat.

The primary strategy for such desktop optimization is a thorough analysis of the user segments within the enterprise and the current usage of the desktop applications by users within these segments. Such an analysis most often reveals that most users in the company only use a small subset of the applications and in addition a subset of the features within them. One such under utilized software on most desktops is productivity tool suite such as Microsoft Office.

Broadly user segments can be classified into rich client and transactional users. Rich client users would be those who use the many complex features within productivity tools and also use many rich applications on the desktop to be more efficient with their day-to-day activities. Transactional users on the other hand are focused on delivering customer transactions and mostly use business applications to process them. Consider a financial services company’s different business lines such as investment banking and retail banking. Investment banking – especially an M&A or IPO business area – would have mostly rich client users and fewer numbers of transactional users. Compare that to the retail bank where the majority of the branch staff is focused on using banking applications to book customer transactions and have very little use for productivity tools except to print a few forms. The distribution of rich client and transactional users will vary by industry vertical but on average rich client users form only 20-25% of the users in large enterprises.

Given that a majority of the users (transactional users) only need access to a small set of business applications and simple productivity tool features, multiple options exist to optimize their desktop costs:

• Migrate users to a simpler productivity tool set such as Open Office or the well supported and award winning Lotus Symphony from IBM.
• If most of the business applications the users need are available over the web, migrate the users to a Linux desktop such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Note that such a migration leaves a much smaller footprint for the current desktop image which is most probably based on a Microsoft Windows environment. The reduction in the need for the Windows platform now creates opportunities for the procurement office to renegotiate the licensing agreements with Microsoft. Opportunities exist to eliminate the Enterprise Agreement and move to a Select Agreement or a Component Enterprise Agreement that would result in substantial savings on license expenses.

The IBM Client for Smart Work announcement that was released to the press yesterday combines these strategies and extends it to include virtual desktops delivered via public or private clouds. One of these solutions is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux desktop software.
Red Hat has made available an online TCO calculator that models these strategies and makes it easy for any company to estimate real cost savings before embarking on implementing such a cost optimization project. Try it out here: http://www.compariv.com/lotusonredhat. The calculator also lets you save your information and share it with others within the enterprise.

Best Regards,
Umesh Harigopal
Ecognize LLC
www.compariv.com

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