Memset Urges Public Sector To Ditch VMware For Open Source

Influential government service supplier Memset has urged local and central government to ditch VMware in favour of open source alternatives.

The company reckons that open-source-based service suppliers, such as itself, can shave as much as 40 percent off government bills simply by removing the licensing fees.

Broader benefits

Memset backed its savings claim using the example of a public sector organisation deploying a high-traffic web application that serves content to its citizens from 35 virtual machines, using a VMware-based IaaS vendor.

The Cabinet Office’s  G-Cloud initiative to open up the procurement process to SME suppliers includes a requirement to consider open source products and services as part of the cost-saving effort.

Robin Pape, Memset’s public sector advisor , said, “We want to educate and raise awareness of the benefits of open source – but, more importantly, we want public sector organisations to know that, just because they are using VMware or other proprietary software for their infrastructure, this shouldn’t stop them from migrating, and that the cost savings are large enough to consider making the move to an open source alternative like Xen.”

This saving is just an example of an immediate benefit, the company said. In use, the lack of licensing fees means a smoother path to gaining scalability, reliability, agility and security for their individual business needs. It also opens the door to further implementations of technology that is based on open standards and thereby can help to avoid vendor lock-ins.

“With the UK government’s £200m spend on Microsoft licensing since 2010 proving to be the headline example of the huge cost of software licences to the UK public sector, we can prove that there are further savings that can be achieved from the infrastructure side of things as well,” claimed Pape.

Memset is already used by local authorities such as Staffordshire, Surrey and Sheffield to evaluate the companies claims that it can save customers around £140,000 over a three-year period.