Council targets £1m savings from Microsoft desktop deal

Staffordshire County Council aims to save £1m in reduced costs through a new Microsoft desktop licensing deal, after deciding against alternative open source options.

The enterprise-wide licensing deal with Microsoft is part of wider standardisation and consolidation initiatives at the council following the centralisation of Staffordshire's four separate IT functions at the beginning of the year.

The three-year deal covers 5,000 desktops across the council and will see Staffordshire standardise PCs - which currently run everything from Windows 98 onwards - onto Windows XP at each refresh. The first project will see 500 PCs in social services upgraded before the end of the year.

More than 25,000 desktops in the education department and Staffordshire schools will be subject to a separate discount licensing programme under Microsoft's education package.

Staffordshire council CIO, Chris Robinson, told silicon.com com he didn't think open source alternatives were ready for the desktop - although the council does run its Oracle CRM systems on IBM Linux blade servers.

He said: "I did look at open source on the desktop in detail but the organisation is not ready to make any moves to open source. I don't think the savings are there yet."

Robinson said the Microsoft licensing deal will also help deliver benefits on future IT initiatives at the council, particularly as the authority is now standardising on .NET as its development platform.

The Staffordshire deal is the 100th enterprise licensing agreement Microsoft has signed in the UK local government sector and is part of the memorandum of understanding the software company signed with the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) three years ago.

That agreement with the OGC was aimed at getting better licensing deals for UK local authorities by using the combined bulk negotiating and purchasing power of the wider public sector.