Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Fri 1st Oct 2004 00:16 UTC
A senior IT executive at a major pharmaceutical company summed up the challenge for Linux at the ZDNet UK IT Priorities conference when he asked one simple question: what are the benefits in migrating from Microsoft to Linux at the desktop?
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I work at a big pharmaceutical company. The desktop OS is largely not the biggest concern for us. It's the apps.
Most pharma companies use CRM apps such as Siebel which have no native Linux clients (and they don't plan to). My company and my ex-company, Novartis, both use Notes as an exchange platform. Hoffman-La Roche, Aventis/Sanofi all use exchange/outlook exclusively for "all their global offices".
This includes our mail, training, expenses and a host of other apps (corporate policies etc). None of these can run on Linux. IBM may tout the fact that they are linux friendly, but yet they've failed to come up with a native port of Linux notes. Most companies, including ours, takes prescription data from another company called IMS (and now Brogan). This data is sorted into very complex excel spreadsheets and distributed to sales force/management for analysis. All of this information cannot be ported to Linux easily. Nothing, not even staroffice/OpenOffice.org, can do what Excel can and porting all of these very complex spreadsheets (monthly IMS data, territorial/managerial cost center expense reports/spreadsheets, monthly sales spreadsheets etc.) do not work with any OSS solution out there.
In addition, the biggest desktop users of a pharma company are the sales force. 99% of them (trust me, I know) have never even heard about Linux. I'm not sure if you can comprehend this, but the costs involved in training them are outrageous. In addition, the ROI you get from moving from Windows to Linux is quite meager (and not Windows Server doesnt' count as this is desktop realm).
So to sum up, lack of support from big vendors such as Siebel, IBM, SAP (in our case) prohibit any plans to move to Linux. In addition, there is no ROI from simply moving to Linux from Windows as this (the OS) is a "very" small part of the big picture