The Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu (ELCOT) in India is rolling out SUSE Linux Enterprise across 30,000 desktops and 1,880 servers in Tamil Nadu's schools, after ELCOT itself migrated its entire IT infrastructure from Microsoft Windows to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop from Novell.

“The open source software in SUSE Linux Enterprise is superb," said C. Umashankar, managing director of ELCOT. “In addition, we estimate that moving to Linux has reduced our general hardware costs by nearly 25%. In the case of high-end servers, the savings could be as much as 80%. Even more important are the benefits for Tamil Nadu's students. There is a growing trend towards the corporate adoption of Linux, both in India and elsewhere, so it will be a real advantage in the job market to have experience working with open source software. It gives us tremendous freedom and choice.”

ELCOT has been procuring hardware and software for the various departments of the Government of Tamil Nadu, which serves a population of more than 70 million, since 1977. ELCOT's main objective is to offer the best possible IT solutions at the lowest price, thus maximizing the return on investment of public money.

Roger Levy, Novell senior vice president and general manager of Open Platform Solutions, said, “ELCOT was able to eliminate tens of thousands of proprietary software licenses by moving to open source software, in addition to their tremendous savings from making better use of hardware resources. The decision to move to a new platform rests not only on immediate pricing considerations, but also on the potential long-term hardware, software and infrastructure costs. Based on those criteria, SUSE Linux Enterprise is proving its value to customers around the world.”