Businesses Save Millions with Open Source!

Now there’s a headline that is fun to type!

Enterprises saving millions of dollars with open source

“Organizations are saving millions of dollars on IT by using open source software. In 2004, open source software saved large companies (with annual revenue of over $1 billion) an average of $3.3 million. Medium-sized companies (between $50 million and $1 billion in annual revenue) saved an average $1.1 million. Firms with revenues under $50 million saved an average $520,000. Asked to categorize all the benefits (cost savings and other) from open source, most companies said they were moderate or major. Some 70% of large firms are seeing moderate or major benefits from open source. Of the companies under $1 billion in revenue, 59% are seeing major benefits.”

Wow! And, check out the stats in this example that the author of the entry (Matt Asay) uses:

“I would argue that the cost savings in the larger organizations is even more substantial. As but one anecdotal example, Alfresco recently talked with a prospect where Microsoft had quoted them tens of millions of dollars for a simple intranet application. The same application built with Alfresco would run the prospect $100,000 (and that’s if they really, really tried hard to spend the money).”

Now THAT’S some REAL savings! Open Source rocks!