Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2001 13:16:10 -0700 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "Mark Lederer" <lederer@mac.com>, <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: Can Freebsd integrate with NT in a large corporation? Message-ID: <005501c10d6a$fd1cc4a0$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <B77749EE.3634%lederer@mac.com>
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Others will certainly tell you the technical specifics and I myself wrote a book on running FreeBSD on Windows networks. But let me address myself to the politics of the situation - because this is the real problem you will face, not the technical arraingements. For starters, I find it hard to belive that BP is spending a half billion dollars a year on IT expenses - that's $10K per employee. I think that what is going on is that the actual expenses are much lower, and the IT budget is being inflated by adding a bunch of unrelated things into it - like telco. For example if you threw all WAN connectivity and long distance billing into the mix they you might approach $10K per employee. However, no matter whether you use Wintel or UNIX for your networking infrastructure, those WAN and Telco costs are going to be the same. So my question would be: first of all, why is this half-billion inflated figure being tossed around? I speculate that it's a red flag that's designed to provoke a response from the upper management - typically who don't know diddly squat about IT infrastructure. What is probably going on is that the top IT person, CIO, is unhappy with the lack of control he or she has over the internal BP IT infrastructure and has concocted this figure in order to incite the CEO to give him or her far more authority over IT infrastructure - such as just telling all you engineers that you have to switch over to Windows and dump UNIX. Right now if he or she tried that all you engineers would band together and complain to the CEO and you would succeed in checkmating her or him. If she or he can sufficiently incite the CEO to belive that there's a problem then they can get God authority to reduce expenses despite the complaints. I mean, after all it's not like an oil company like BP is in any danger of going out of business! I think if you took a look at the IT budget and sliced out all the fixed costs that are not changable - like Telco - that you would find that BP's IT infrastructure costs are not out of line with those of any other large company. So, what should your response be to this? Well the first thing "the engineering community" needs to do is push back against IT and demand an accounting of what IT costs are being attributed to your department. Why is your department being singled out? Is your LAN management costs somehow higher than those of any of the other departments? You need this data because if you ever want to have any hope of promoting FreeBSD you have got to get a handle on what your really spending on solutions NOW that FreeBSD could replace. If you go into IT now and say "We can change to FreeBSD and save X dollars" without knowing how much money they are spending on you now, they will eat you alive because they will just say "Switch to Windows and you can save X+5K per user" and you will have no way of validating that figure. You have to hold their feet to the fire first and make them poop out a figure of how much they think they are "losing" by you being on UNIX and not Windows. If you haven't figured out by now what I'm talking about here is a discussion of perception vs reality. I can assure you that BP is a significant customer on Microsoft's radarscope. Their sales group will not allow BP to switch away from Microsoft without a massive fight. You do not know it but you very well be dealing with a CIO that has already gone to Microsoft and told them "We are thinking of switching to Sun/Linux/insert OS of choice here" just to see what they could get - and Microsoft may have already told them "We will outfit your entire engineering group with Windows solutions for free if you agree to not switch away from us" Far from FreeBSD being a cost savings because it's free you may be fighting in a war of free vs free, and the fact that FreeBSD is free makes no difference on the cost savings equation. Anyway, good luck. Hopefully I've given you a glimpse into how decisions often work in IT groups in large companies. Remember that whatever proposal you put together to save money that the competition will be given a chance to meet or beat it - and they won't blink about undercutting you on price to prevent you from getting a foothold, and they will do their best to bribe/give gifts/otherwise influence the IT decision makers, and to cast FUD on your proposal. In this instance your almost better off doing a proposal to switch the company over to Solaris - because then you can get the Sun salespeople in to play all the dirty tricks on IT too and end up with a stalemate that way. Ted Mittelstaedt tedm@toybox.placo.com Author of: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide Book website: http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com -----Original Message----- From: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG]On Behalf Of Mark Lederer Sent: Sunday, July 15, 2001 11:24 AM To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Can Freebsd integrate with NT in a large corporation? Folks, I am an engineer working at BP Amoco in Houston. I have been using Unix for the last 12 years. The engineering community has been challenged by our corporate IT big wigs to come up with innovative ways to reduce our $500M+ IT expenses. I’m sure they want to hear things like scrap the Unix workstations and do everything on Wintel. That’s another issue, at least while the apps are missing. So my question is: Could a very large corporation like BP convert several thousand NT file, web and print servers from NT to Freebsd to save money. The savings being not having to license NT and increased uptime(?). Possibly OS support is cheaper or near zero. I’m sure BP would still want NT for Exchange (email) and login authentication. MY QUESTION IS: Can Freebsd severs use NT authentication methods or would that be a problem. Remember, 50,000+ users have Wintel on the desktop. Crazy idea or not? Have other very large corporations ever done this or currently do this? Mark Lederer Sugar Land, TX, USA Email: lederer@mac.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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