Age on Telstra and Microsoft and the increasing number of government organisations looking at switching to Linux.
“Although chief executive Steve Ballmer says Microsoft will talk to customers about its “value proposition”, deep price discounting is not on the agenda. Despite analysts who recommend open-source or free software to enterprises over Microsoft on the server and increasingly on the desktop, Ballmer predictably says Microsoft’s products cost less than free software in the long run.
That hasn’t stopped Telstra – Microsoft’s first enterprise licensing customer in the world – the Federal Government and several banks considering the switch to free software alternatives. In July, Centrelink, the world’s 12th-biggest processing organisation, started a lab to develop free software Linux. A month later the Federal Department of Veterans Affairs, as part of a $90 million three-year contract with IBM Global Services Australia, moved its file and print services to an IBM zSeries mainframe running Linux.”