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El Reg reports
The city of Moscow has announced it's going to start ditching Microsoft, following a call by president Vladimir Putin for Russia to be more self-reliant, and is starting with an untried-at-scale e-mail system.
The phase-out will start by replacing Microsoft Exchange servers and Outlook clients, on 6,000 of the city's computers, with an e-mail system from state-run carrier Rostelecom.
Windows and Office could be next on the list, and local reports suggest the shift could impact as many as 600,000 end users.
According to local business news outlet Vedomosti (in Russian here), the scale of the eventual rollout is because eventually schools, doctors, and housing and community service workers will be using the city-provided e-mail software.
The migration to email servers hosted at Rostelcom, using software from New Cloud Technologies in Russia, is expected to take two years.
Vedomosti says the city has budgeted RUB 43.6 million (about US$700,000) for the initial project, and that the new licenses will be around 30 per cent cheaper than Moscow's current Microsoft bill.
[...] Bloomberg [...] quotes communications minister Nikolay Nikiforov as saying "We want the money of taxpayers and state-run firms to be primarily spent on local software".
Moscow's CIO Artem Yermolaev said the city has already swapped out Cisco's surveillance camera software for local product.
In March, Oracle slagged off PostgreSQL in an attempt to fend off Russian moves towards the libre database.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 29 2016, @08:36PM
If properly maintained, it is in the best interest of most large organizations (nations, companies, etc.) to write and maintain their own software.
Not really. It makes it that much easier for the NSA to target and deliver exploits which have a much smaller security community to try and detect and obviate. It allows NSA to put detaiiled "tiger teams" on cracking specific system classes and not having to worry so much about detectable bleed-over. You lose the economy of scale that is the Windows security community, for example. And joke all you want, the faux-crowdsourcing of security is the absolute best free benefit that Microsoft currently enjoys. Same for added features - the reduced cost yet increased profit that a generic program offers almost always outweighs the cost-benefit of maintaining internal IT development.
Economy of scale, bitches. It works every time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 29 2016, @11:39PM
when you're talking about large organizations (nations, companies, etc) that is your economy of scale
the larger the organization, the less competitive an off-the-shelf product becomes