The French Government’s public finance department will switch 130,000 desktop PC’s to Mozilla’s email and calendar applications. Mozilla’s Thunderbird email service, Lightning Calendar and an open-source groupware will replace IBM Lotus Notes and Microsoft Office.
The move signals how more government agencies from around the world are dropping enterprise accounts with major vendors to cut down on costs and get better license agreements.They are turning to open-source providers and companies like Google that can offer email and services such as Google Docs.
01net, a French IT news site, originally broke the news about the Mozilla win. The decision to go with Mozilla came after the Directorate General of Public Finance (DGPF) merged with the Directorate General of Taxes (DGI) and the Directorate General of Public Accountancy (DGCP). Each has their own email and licenses for Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook.
The merger provided the opportunity to save money and better manage the licenses.
OBM is the other player in this story. Linagora makes the open-source groupware that will be used by DGPF.The tax authority is one of several French agencies using OBM. More than 600,000 French employees use the application.
The French Government’s decision to go open-source follows the city of Los Angeles decision this week to adopt Google Apps over Microsoft. Again, the win has almost everything to do with cost. The city will pay $7.25 million for the service.
About 30,000 city employees will use Gmail and have access to Google Docs.
