UK Government Pays Microsoft £5.5M For Extended Support of Windows XP 341
whoever57 (658626) writes "The UK Government has signed a contract worth £5.5M (almost $9M) for extended support and security updates for Windows XP for 12 months after April 8. The deal covers XP, Exchange 2003 and Office 2003 for users in central and local government, schools and the National Health Service. The NHS is in need of this deal because it was estimated last September that 85% of the NHS's 800,000 computers were running XP."
TCO (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:UK Taxpayers (Score:4, Interesting)
What I would like to know is how much would it have cost to upgrade to Linux? As a UK Taxpayer, I would prefer my money to be invested in Linux systems instead of Microsoft.
Much more than that, obviously. You don't replace the operating system, reinstall and develop specialist applications for £5 a PC. Of course, paying for extended support doesn't move you forward, so you have to some sort of migration next year.
And really, as a taxpayer (IMHO), you (and I) should be wondering how the NHS managed to piss £10 billion away on a failed IT project, and how we can avoid them doing it again. £5 million across the whole of government is fairly small beer to keep existing systems going, compared to the amount you could blow on a load of migration projects.
It sucks that some departments are going to miss the deadline but the questions I'd like to know the answer to are 'what are their migration projects for next year?' and 'are they on track to be completed before the extended support runs out?'. Have they got a credible plan, and it's just slipped a little, or is it a total fuck up? That, to me, is the big money question.
Microsoft: Support XP users (Score:5, Interesting)
No excuses! IF the UK government can pay for continued support, that means you still have to develop and test the updates anyways.,
You should offer users (who are not upgrading anyways) continued security updates for $20 per XP seat per year.
Re:Why not use GNU/Linux? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is exactly it. I know one hospital that recently "refreshed" their hardware to new Quad core 4th generation i5 desktops. The OS - Windows XP SP1. Why?
The specialist medical applications that they run are too expensive to upgrade, and the version they run doesn't support XP SP2. Medical software is not cheap - something like a "results reporting system" which aggregates test results from multiple departments (e.g. blood chemistry, hematology, MRI, ultrasound, physiology, cardiology, etc.) and presents them to a physician - can cost $1million for the license. For a PACS (X-ray viewing and archiving) software, the license could easily cost $10 million for a large hospital (or group of hospitals).
If it would cost you $2 million to replace a specialist app, then you may be stuck with having to use an older OS - especially, if the app developer has gone out of business and you no longer have any support (very, very common in the medical industry).
Some of the more forward thinking IT departments have started rolling out Windows 7, and using some sort of virtualization service, to run the specialist apps under the appropriate OS/IE version/Java runtime/.NET runtime that each one needs. The difficulty with this, is that you essentially have not just your Win7 environment to manage, but also all the individual virtualized run time environments. The administrative burden that this requires can be substantial.