Barclays saves up to 90% in costs after moving to Open Source Drive

Barclays reported to V3 a reduction of its IT spending for the development of new software and applications by 90 percent. The reason for this high amount of savings is moving to an internal private cloud solution based on open source Linux software.

A spokeperson for Barclays told V3 about the advantages of incorporating alternative IT systems to improve efficiencies and save costs across its business:

"It means we can write new applications once and then develop them using an open source model, rather than re-writing them again for legacy systems."

Main tasks have been driven by Shaygan Kheradpir, Chief Operating Officer of Barclays Retail, who has also pushed the development of key toos, such as Pingit, a mobile payment service, as well as Banking application. He asserted:

"Because information is hosted on our secure internal cloud information that provides access to our legacy systems, whether you are a mortgage or credit customer for example, it can still be accessed. This was not possible beforehand".

The move appear to be successful, as application has been downloaded 1.3 million times each across UK.

References:
http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2234593/barclays-slashes-software-spend-by-90-percent-with-open-source-drive

Carlos Daffara: "Open Source Contribution to Europe's economy: 450 billion euros"

According to Open Source researcher Carlos Daffara, the savings associated to the use of Open Source in Europe, taking into account all advantages provided, rises to 450 billion euro.
Directly using Open Source software solutions means reducing costs up to 114 billion euro.
Moreover direct costs, other aspects, such as reduction of project failures, as well as reduction of code maintenance, mean savings, from Daffara's point of view, up to 342 billion euro.

From Daffara's point of view, applying macroeconomic estimation and data from code reuse, up to 35% percent of the software used in the past five years is directly or indirectly related to Open Source software.
Meanwhile, it seems that Daffara's numbers are not far from another industry groups and analysts estimations, that consider savings aroung 374 billion and 399 billion euro.

References:
[1] https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/news/contribution-open-source-europes-economy-450-billion-year

LiMux to save €11Million for the city of Munich

The city of Munich started, on year 2004, the LiMux project, its particular distribution of Linux, in order to achieve a fully opensource desktop infrastructure.

Switching from Windows to Linux, in particular to LiMux,  the city of Munich has saved over €11 million ($14.3 million) to date compared to the costs of a similar migration to a more modern Microsoft-based IT infrastructure.

The total cost was calculated taking into account several factors as:

- Upgrade costs saved taking into account migration from Windows 2000 to Windows 7

- Upgrade costs saved taking into account hardware upgrade that was avoided

- Software licenses savings

Check the complete story on "ItWorld":

http://www.itworld.com/operating-systems/321474/switching-linux-saves-munich-over-11-million