Linux: Reducing Costs in Government Applications, By Jean Staten Healy

As we prepare for GOSCON this year, there are a number of key topics that come to mind. When one thinks about “Government” today, undoubtedly we hear discussions around cuts in government services; the need to raise taxes; stopping or reducing deficit spending and the general trend of doing more with less. This is not just at the Federal level, it is also a focus at the state and local government levels, too. In 2007, for the first time in history, the majority of the world’s population—3.3 billion people—lived in cities. By 2050, city dwellers are expected to make up 70% of Earth’s total population, or 6.4 billion people. So isn’t it critical for us to start to understand just how technology fits into this ever-growing clamor for improved government services at reduced costs to the taxpayer?
Well, quite pragmatically, IBM strongly believes that Linux has a key role in “Smarter Government”. Smarter Government isn’t just the day-to-day administration. It’s more expansive than that – it’s evidenced where we work, where we live: it’s Smarter Water; Smarter Traffic; Smarter Energy; Smarter Telecommunications. Smarter Government means helping to promote economic growth by streamlining cumbersome processes and simplifying reporting requirements, which are especially burdensome to small firms.
What we sometimes really don’t think much about in analyzing these “Smarter” solutions is the operating system (OS) on which these “Smarter” solutions run. Numerous studies have shown the Linux Operating System to have a lower Total Cost of Ownership, particularly in virtualized data centers, and that should indeed help the bottom line which affects the services delivered to our communities. (ftp://public.dhe.ibm.com/linux/pdfs/GCG_Virtualization-Linux_vs_MSFT.pdf).
For example, the Dundee City Council IT department standardized on a single operating system, on both mainframes and x86 hardware, which provided a stable, secure, flexible and cost-effective platform for business-critical applications. That single OS? SLES from Novell.
Another example is within our own Department of the Interior’s National Business Center (DOI), which provides shared IT services for federal agencies both within and outside the DOI. They often compete – and win – against other larger service providers because their infrastructure is backed by IBM System z10 mainframes running Linux. The DOI National Business Center can offer shared IT services at a lower cost because the utilization of a mainframe is often between 80-100%.
One last example of Linux I’ll mention here is the City of Burbank, which had a complex, multi-vendor, multi-OS environment. The mixed environment was driving unnecessary complexity and expense, so the City consolidated on IBM BladeCenter and migrated to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). As a result, the City achieved better performance, significant space savings, and reduced costs for hardware, power, cooling, maintenance, monitoring and licensing. On top of this, another government agency did the same, and implemented redundant failover between the two IT environments. Not a bad idea when you take into account the number of earthquakes annually (13 in the past month alone, within 30 miles of LA).
So all of these examples focus on providing customers with a strategic choice in their data centers as well as lowering operating costs to the respective government body. Providing savings to the taxpayer, while better serving the overall public is a win/win situation for all concerned. The point is that by using Linux, whether it is RHEL, SLES, Ubuntu, or one of many others, you are enabling your organization to have an open, flexible environment where applications can run on multiple platforms. Flexibility has value, and true cross-platform support means organizations can use the architecture that makes the most sense for a workload while maintaining a single, standard enterprise operating system. Additionally, IBM is one of the leading vendors of middleware, helping organizations build solutions for a Smarter Government. So whether it involves Business Intelligence to improve decision making or Smart Work solutions to implement more effective collaboration and communication, IBM’s total solution enables governments to respond to changes in the environment more rapidly.
So I look forward to GOSCON, where those from Local and State Government, in particular, who face these day-to-day pressures in their communities will be congregating and participating in forward thinking solutions. I hope you will join the discussion as we seek answers to Government’s most pressing problems from a technology solution point of view.

For more information about Healy’s talk at GOSCON, titled Efficiency? Lower Cost? Innovation?: What Does Linux and Open Source Mean to the Public Sector CIO in 2010?, go to http://goscon.org/sessions/efficiency-lower-cost-innovation-what-does-linux-and-open-source-mean-public-sector-cio-20.

Jean Staten Healy, Director of Worldwide Cross IBM Linux Strategy, will be speaking at the Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON) on October 27.