Friday, May 11, 2007

Open Solutions in Education? - Let's Do the Math!

I recently was told by a friend that works at a district that they have been looking at options to replace their homegrown SIS. They are a small district and so PowerSchool was a natural choice. Pearson, the new owners of PowerSchool, quoted them $28 per student just for the software and data templates. That didn't include any help converting their existing data, modifying business processes or working on change management. In fact, Pearson quoted $225 per hour to perform these types of services. I am not sure about your small district, but my friend's district could hardly afford to pay a vendor $225 an hour plus travel expenses.

It occurs to me, that districts, especially smaller ones, should be considering the many open source options that are out there today and being used. Do you need a student information system or data warehouse? Try Centre (http://www.miller-group.com). Do you need a learning management system that can deliver courses on-line? Try Moodle. (http://www.moodle.org) Going Linux? Try the latest distribution of Edubuntu, based on the new Feisty Fawn release of Ubuntu. It comes pre-loaded with education specific software (http://www.edubuntu.org). How about a libary solution? Try OpenBiblio. (http://obiblio.sourceforge.net) How about Linux thin clients? Try K12LTSP (http://www.k12ltsp.org) You can use old PC's (remember those PC's businesses try to give you? Hint, Hint.) or buy brand new pre-configured clients for about $200.

The fact is, that for those districts that are willing to be pioneers and accept a few occasional bugs or forego some functionality for a period of time, open source solutions are coming into their own and maturing to a point where districts should consider using them in critical situations.

Many people always say get open source because it is free. That is not true and it is misleading. Open source must be supported and there are costs associated with that support. Open source often needs customization and there are costs associated with that effort. (Usually not $225 per hour). But over time, the total cost of ownership (TCO) tends to be far lower than that of a commercial alternative.

There are also the associated costs that can go away as well. Going open source can remove these licensing costs: (these are estimates only)

Windows Operating System - $50
Microsoft Office - $50 (use OpenOffice)
Windows Server - $2500 per server
Exchange Email - no idea but will guess $2,500 (use Zimbra. Comcast thinks Zimbra is good enough for its 12 million clients)
Microsoft SQL Server - $2,000 per server (use MySQL or PostgreSQL)
Many more could be listed.....

The real difference in open source is the word open. You get the source code and when you train people with the skills to modify the code, you have the flexibility that a commercial vendor takes away from you. State department changes a data collection requirement and you have PowerSchool? Guess what? $225 an hour to make the customization to fulfill the new requirement. You have an open source SIS? Only the cost of your IT guy and a fix in place much faster in most cases.

Open also means that your solutions can run on older HW, which can be a huge cost savings. I asked a friend in a large district how many PC's they had and he said about 35,000. I asked him if he had ever heard of OpenOffice. He said no, so I showed it to him and he was impressed that a free product had that many features. Let's do the math: 35,000 X $50 (M$FT Office license fee) = $1,750,000. So let's see at an average salary of $45,000 plus benefits, which probably comes to around $60,000, that buys me a teacher that is completely paid for for the next 20+ years assuming some raises along the way. By the way, that district must pay licensing every year for that M$FT software, so every year I add a new teacher that is paid for for the next 20+ years.

Also, by being able to use older HW, I can avoid the HW refresh cycles that are driven by new commercial products. Can you run Vista on your current desktop or laptop? Ummm, probably not and that is why HW vedors love M$FT. Imagine avoiding one HW refresh cycle for 10,000 computers like my friend just did. 10,000 X 1,000 = $10,000,000, which buys me 166 teachers for 8 years.

I can go on and on with numerous examples like this, but you should have the idea by now. Perhaps open source is worth a look.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Casey, thanks for the reference to Zimbra.

We have 100+ Educations customers for the commercial version of our Zimbra Collaboration Suite, from small K-12 school districts to universities with 50,000+ users. As you might expect, we have deep price discounts for the education market. We also have an unknown number of educational institutions using our free open source version (since we don't require registrations for those downloading the free open source version). More information on our focus on education is here, http://www.zimbra.com/products/zimbra_for_education.html Thanks again

Casey said...

Andy, thanks for the post. From everything I have seen about Zimbra, I ask the question why aren't educators using it? I am on a personal mission to help K12 understand that there are good alternatives available in open source. The TCO is almost always lower and the flexibility of choice is key. People always tell me, we don't know open source or we don't have the skills. And I always reply, did you have those skills when you left MS-DOS and went to Windows? I get tired of the "not wanting to change game". Thanks again for the post.

Nyle said...

Hi Casey, Zimbra is a full featured and robust product. The OSS version is great and cost effective. However, the current licensing model for education on the supported advanced version(has features som schools need) is about $14/per mailbox/per year.

That is far more expensive than several other Open Source email servers. While I recognize that Zimbra is more full featured even in it's OSS version. I hope that they will offer some additional lower cost options for licensing in the future.

Perhaps, with less support but still allowing access to advanced features like smartphone support.

Thanks for the great site and your articles are wonderful.