The Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu (Elcot) began its enterprise migration to Linux 20 months ago with a single laptop issued to the government agency's managing director, C. Umashankar. On May 26, 2006, Umashankar walked into his office in Chennai (the capital of India's Tamil Nadu state) and was handed a brand-new laptop. He recalls promptly giving it back to his assistant. "I asked him to load Suse Linux on it. I guess he was surprised," Umashankar says. "But when the installation—complete with drivers and wireless networking—only took 45 minutes and very little external effort, there was a new confidence in my assistant."

That confidence spread quickly. Within weeks, Elcot, the Rs 7.5 billion ($190.4 million) agency that runs IT for the Tamil Nadu government, was undergoing an enterprisewide migration to Suse Linux. By last year, Umashankar and his team had moved 30,000 computers and 1,880 severs belonging to some of the state's schools to Linux—possibly the largest Linux rollout in India. And they're not done yet.

For an organization with enormous responsibilities (the Tamil Nadu government serves a population the size of the United Kingdom; its current projects include computerizing land records and producing 18 million benefit cards for welfare recipients), there were a million ways they could blow it. With no vendor support, the odds were against success. Meanwhile, although Umashankar could sell his vision for a Linux-enabled enterprise within his own organization, it was another matter convincing other agencies that had to use the equipment to go along.

In a July 2007 report, Gartner analyst Mark Driver wrote that open source has been deployed primarily by the most aggressive technology adopters in order to gain flexibility and independence from vendors. The report predicts that open-source use will expand between now and 2012 to more conservative organizations motivated by cost and risk reduction. Umashankar was convinced that Elcot could no longer afford proprietary technology (the agency was a Microsoft shop). Every technology refresh, every new service, every new school that his department equipped came with a significant price. Open source offered a way to keep pace without busting the budget.

Start With Your Own Shop

By the first week of June 2006, Umashankar started moving Elcot's desktops to machines with the Suse Linux OS. The migration of more than 200 desktops at Elcot's headquarters took a little more than eight months.

P.R. Krishnamoorthy, senior business development manager at Elcot, says the biggest challenge was end-user resistance. "But once people started using it, they saw benefits and became fond of it. We won't go back, this is an irreversible process."