Ubuntu Desktops are Ready for the Corporate World

Ubuntu Desktops are Ready for the Corporate World.

Long have I thought about starting my own company and how I would run it. One of the first things I thought about was how forcing all employees to use Linux based operation systems like Ubuntu would save me an incredible amount of money and allow me to refrain from seeking outside investment early on. In my experience, Windows is a ridiculously huge money-pit for businesses. Unfortunately, most companies view it as a necessary evil. In reality; it's worse. Windows is a huge, gargantuan, and ever propagating necessary evil. Lately, Ubuntu has been getting a little bit of hate from the Open Source community because they feel the parent company, Canonical, has sold out. To me, the steps they have taken have been positive, especially for the business community. So without further ado, let's go into the key reasons of why Ubuntu is now ready for prime-time.

Ubuntu is absolutely ready for the corporate world.

Ubuntu is a distribution of the Linux operation system that has made great strides in creating a user-friendly desktop that end-users can actually use in the past few years. The Ubuntu team has also made great strides to make the enterprise management of a large amount of desktops easy. Your company can set up an entire domain and enterprise solution with no licensing fees at all, or you can purchase management software and support packages at a fraction of the Windows costs. There are no requirements to spend money other than on hardware.

You'd think that a large amount of organizations would jump at the chance to go to a zero-cost operating system, but there have been very good reasons why they haven't. First of all, most people in the corporate world couldn't imagine life without Microsoft Word and Excel. These are the quintessential desktop applications that most corporate workers use. Second, Linux desktops have been buggy. If you have ever tried to install it on your own system you may have found printing, sound, or video issues that could only be resolved by diving into the command line terminal and running complicated commands that may or may not have completely reduced your system to a paperweight. Ubuntu has eased this considerably and allowed all such administration to be done from a central location with their Landscape system management tool so users never have to deal with these things. 

Here is a list of other products the operating system comes with that make the Corporate dependency on Windows unnecessary.

• Comes with an alternative to Microsoft Office. LibreOffice is basically a free version of the main Microsoft Office apps used in the corporate worlds. You'll find there are plenty of other alternatives to this as well.
• Comes with powerful  firewall software and ClamAV anti-virus software is freely available. The anti-virus can be installed and the built-in firewall software is professional and takes very little processing power and RAM. One of the advantages of using something other than Windows is there are just not nearly as many viruses out there for UNIX based operating systems. You can still get one; especially with the browser-based ones, but the overall risk is much lower.
• Has a nice customizable desktop. The Ubuntu desktop can be modified to look just like Windows and can even have a version of the task bar with a start menu. This can be done either by your administrators or by downloading a flavor of Ubuntu called Mint.
• Servers come with a free built-in alternative to Microsoft Exchange. You can purchase less expensive server applications that act like Exchange and even migrate data from Exchange servers.
• Users can use the applications, browse the web, and do pretty much everything they already do very easily the day they switch. It's incredibly easy to set up a user's desktop with all that they need to start working right away with minimal downtime.
• Ubuntu is easy to install en-mass. The ease of setting up a system to fully install and configure Ubuntu on 1,000 desktops with the push of a button over the network takes away a lot of installation worries.
• Professional computer management software is available.  Landscape, a paid management suite from Canonical, allows for central management of security groups, deployment, administration, and monitoring of all Ubuntu virtual or physical machines.
• Ubuntu is also becoming tablet ready. A lot of corporate workers are making the switch to tablets, and new tablets are already coming out that support Ubuntu.
• Software companies are partnering with the company that manages Ubuntu. Canonical has been partnering with large companies such as IBM to get more server and desktop applications to work easily with Ubuntu. I feel as though this is a positive direction for the company to go in that can only help businesses that wish to use their operating system.

Windows is expensive.

This is the number one driving force behind finding an alternative desktop solution for a corporate environment. The costs of choosing Windows are very large and long-term. Historically, companies have had to eat these costs because there was no viable alternative.

The following is a rundown of how expensive it really is to use Windows.

• Windows licenses are expensive. When you buy a computer, the licensing costs for Windows are transferred to you in the cost. At the time of this posting, a Windows 8.1 license currently costs between $119.99 and $199.99.
• From day one, you will need to buy or rent servers to host a Windows domain. Windows Server 2008 licensing alone can run you around $400. Running that domain requires the usual IT personnel; be it a college grad if you're small or an entire group of highly paid (85k-120k) and experienced personnel if you're big. Active Directory must be administered, group policies must be established, and server hardening must be performed if you want to even remotely have the chance of keeping your data and system secure.  Not to say you won't have to hire the same people otherwise, but all of this adds up.
• Using Microsoft Windows propagates the use of Microsoft products regardless of the cost/benefit ratio. Your management will almost always default to the Microsoft solution as your company grows and the cost of using these solutions generally grows exponentially. For instance, every Microsoft shop I've ever been in has decided to use incredibly expensive Microsoft SQL database servers for their applications regardless of size or complexity. Why? Because it appears to be easy and comfortable. Microsoft SQL is almost always not the only option. Other free options like PostgreSQL for large databases or even MySQL are easy to install and use and bring much less administrative overhead to the company. Why choose option “Microsoft” and spend thousands more on servers and licensing fees? Why not use the proven reliability of UNIX for as many server applications as you can? The reason is because management uses Microsoft products every day and they will gravitate to their comfort zone by default. Without a major conscious decision to look at other technologies, the company will likely become a complete Microsoft shop with all servers and applications requiring Microsoft Windows.
• You will be forced to perform expensive migrations over and over. Every few or so years Microsoft releases a wonderful operation system that everyone loves. They did it with Windows 95, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows 7. Unfortunately, every other few years someone in management gets the wonderful idea to revamp everything and release an abomination that nobody in their right mind would purposefully use. They did that with Windows Me, Windows Vista, and now with Windows 8. Assuming that your management is savvy enough to not be convinced to migrate every single one of your desktops to one of those nightmares, you will eventually need to upgrade to one of the good ones. Say your company needs to replace 10,000 desktops. A low-to-moderate estimate of the labor and license cost of migration for this large of an organization would be around $1,500 per desktop. A basic calculation would put that upgrade at 15 Million dollars.
• You absolutely have to buy new computers every 6 to 8 years. If you are still using a laptop from 2003 at your company, I feel sorry for you. Every click must feel like a lifetime of waste. Every little task you perform probably feels like moving a glacier. This is primarily because the basic requirements to get a Windows system up and running smoothly scale up over time. For instance; Microsoft requirements for a Windows XP system are a 233 MHz processor and 64 MB of ram. By now, your company has probably finished upgrading to Windows 7. Microsoft requirements for a 32-bit Windows 7 system are a 1 Ghz (that's 1,000 MHz) processor and 1 GB (that's 1024 MB) of ram. A good laptop from 2003 had about 512 MB of ram and would definitely have to be replaced in an upgrade to Windows 7.

I think that I've spent enough time on how expensive Windows desktops get for organizations. If you talk to Microsoft or read their documentation about costs they will try to convince you that you will actually save money using Microsoft. In all fairness, sometimes you actually may save money using Microsoft, but you should make all of your product decisions based on rational thought and an honest cost-to-benefit analysis.

Ubuntu is not expensive.

The number one selling point of using Linux for desktops is the licensing price. The price to license one copy of a distribution of Linux like Ubuntu is zero dollars. Yes, you can pay up to $1,200 for an central administration server license and even pay extra for enterprise level support, but you honestly don't even have to do that. You can pay zero dollars and zero cents to run any version of Ubuntu on your desktops and servers. 

Lets do a quick rundown of what other costs savings an organization may get from this.

• The system requirements are Low. Current minimum system requirements for desktop Ubuntu are 64 MB of ram and 5 GB of hard-drive space. That's it. To put this in perspective, a computer from 2003 with 512 MB of ram would be enough to run a simple Ubuntu desktop.  1 GB of RAM would give you all of the power you would need to run multiple applications smoothly. This translates into far less expensive hardware than you could ever get with Windows.
• Administrators are generally highly effective workers. The only expensive aspect of running an Ubuntu shop is the fact that UNIX administrators generally have higher salaries. I personally believe that this is because many of them are just higher quality employees. This isn't to say that there are plenty of top-quality Windows administrators out there, but you need a certain level of technical know-how to be an effective UNIX administrator. That tends to weed out a lot of people who really shouldn't be working in the industry. With higher quality employees, you get built-in cost savings that are hard to qualify on paper, and in reality the low cost of the system in general far outweighs the cost of your administrators. I mean no disrespect to Windows administrators; my current job is 90% Windows administration and I work with very bright people.
• Managers have more incentive to use less expensive and better software solutions. Since managers aren't immersed in Windows 24/7, it's easier for them to pick solutions more based on merit than the alternative. They're still free to pick a Windows solution if it's the best option, but they'll also be more comfortable looking elsewhere if it isn't. I think this is by far the best value. Anyone who has been part of a mega-million dollar project based on the wrong technology can attest to the horrific loss of dollars and bottom line that can come out of it. This can be the difference between paying 15 million or 300 million for solution over the implementation life-cycle.

Companies, especially start-ups should look at Ubuntu or other flavors of Linux for their desktop solution.

Corporate conversion from Windows to Ubuntu or any flavor of Unix is currently very low. Novel is the easiest one to point at as they're in the process of doing a complete migration from Windows desktop to Linux. Another issue companies may have right now is the fact that there is no real viable alternative out there for Cisco IP Communicator; a program some organizations use as a soft-phone option with Windows, although some have been able to emulate it. Others may be hesitant to switch because of some of their browser applications requiring Internet Explorer. Many companies are most likely taking a wait and see approach right now. Nobody really wants to be a first adopter. 

That said, start-ups and small companies are in a unique position to just take the plunge and go full Ubuntu. I don't know about you, but if I start a job and they hand me an Ubuntu computer, I don't start complaining that it isn't Windows. On the other hand, if I'd been using Windows at the same job for ten years and you suddenly made me switch I would probably not appreciate it. Many start-ups are actually making the decision to not go Windows. They are using Macs instead. I think that works fine for small and growing businesses, but as it scales, the cost of buying and maintaining those $3,000 Macs for your workforce will really start to hurt the bottom line. If the money is flowing that much that you can afford to go Mac, then the cost of using Windows was probably never really a factor.

I really only scratched the surface of this subject. I do admit a slight amount of bias, but if you asked me three years ago if Linux could replace Windows in the corporate world I would tell you “absolutely not”. Since this is just my tiny blog that only a few people read, I don't really think this will start a real dialog. If it does, I hope it sparks a real and passionate debate. It's really been a long time coming.