As pioneers in the e-gover nance space in India, we have been working closely with various departments of the central and state governments and public sector organisations for the last 13 years now and have a critical role to play in every major e-government initiative in the country today. To quote statistics, more than 150 e-governance applications in India are deployed on Windows today.

Driven by the overriding belief that the prime responsibility for governments is to govern rather than create software, at Microsoft we focus on constantly raising the bar in terms of providing leading-edge software for our government partners across the world that can be leveraged successfully for facilitating a more participative form of governance.

Leveraging our global expertise, we share long-standing partnerships with Indian governments in our role both as a technology provider as well as a consultant in defining and delivering on the blue print for IT adoption across various organs of the government. Our efforts in total, are geared towards providing a holistic solution for enabling governments to deliver electronic and integrated public services, bridge the digital divide, foster life long learning, develop more citizen-centric processes and effect economic development.

Even in the recent economic downturn when many companies were cutting back on Research and Development budgets, we invested more than $5 billion dollars in R&D in 2002 alone. For 2003, the budget increased even further to $5.2 billion. This research allows us to actively explore the future of computing and to smoothly integrate the results of these efforts into our products.

The benefits of this approach for governments include greater competitive advantage, safer investment and greater value for money.

Key Parameters for Governments
The choice of particular software should be based on a variety of factors including cost, value, transparency, security, reliability, and compatibility. As a vendor of commercially developed software, which is designed with customer needs in mind, we support neutral government procurement laws that base purchase decisions on the merits of competing products.

We recommend that every government department must weigh five basic considerations when evaluating software, which are:

Cost and Value:  This criteria extends beyond the initial acquisition cost of the software to typically include the total cost of ownership over a period of time in order to understand how a piece of software impacts the overall information technology budget. The common perception is that an operating system that is free would also cost less to maintain and operate over the long term. However such a claim is baseless, since for most open source software additional costs cover training, services and support. This implies that in the final analysis, the summary of acquisition costs, application server software, management add-ons, deployment time, and support costs in total exceed that of any commercial solution.

Recent studies show that Open Source Software can have a higher TCO compared to proprietary offerings. A recent IDC study concluded that Linux solutions are more expensive than those built with Microsoft’s Windows offering. The study was based on evaluating five common workloads in computing (i.e. network infrastructure, print serving, file serving, security applications and web serving) that challenge the common industry perception that Linux is "free."

The IDC study suggests that Microsoft Windows 2000 offers lower total cost than a Linux solution in four of the five workloads common to most IT environments. In these four workloads (network infrastructure, print serving, file serving, and security applications), the cost advantages of Windows are significant: 11.22% less over a five-year period.

Therefore, focusing solely on up-front cost is not practical. Governments must evaluate other factors to determine the value a piece of software offers. Value relates to the functionality of the software, the cost of integrating it with existing systems, and the ability of users to make productive use of it, an area where Microsoft offerings hold a distinct advantage over competing options.

Transparency:  For governments, transparency of software essentially implies access to a software program’s source code. In sync with this requirement we ensure that select government customers can view the code, by providing Microsoft Windows in a Shared Source code form.

By providing source code for inspection, governments can examine the code to verify that it performs as advertised and contains no hidden features. That said, simply making technology transparent is no panacea. Most people are not trained to examine and understand technical software information in the form of source code. Traditional forms of product support and basic functionality therefore are more important to most government customers than source code availability.

Security:  Ensuring security of sensitive government information is the top-most priority facing governments today. In the context of governments and e-government networks where several departments, citizen communities and partners are accessing the same information, security becomes imperative.

In this context critical parameters like the common criteria certification which is an internationally recognized certification program to evaluate software security become important. Microsoft Windows successfully conforms to the common criteria certification unlike open source programs which have not undergone any rigorous security evaluation.

Additionally, security vulnerabilities in Open Source Software which often go unnoticed with the limited scenarios that actually deploy Open Source Software, these vulnerabilities also often remain un-addressed for long periods of time because there is no central organization driving development. In contrast, at Microsoft we have a dedicated team of people who focus only on security. When vulnerability is discovered they work with development teams to create a fix, test it and communicate quickly to our customers worldwide. That is our responsibility and just one part of our efforts to create trustworthy computing.

Evaluating Open Source Software for security is a complex proposition. The proponents of open source constantly stress on the fact that anyone can potentially examine the source code, identify security flaws and propose security fixes. However, it is important to understand here that this "many eyes" benefit does not insure security. In fact, some Open Source Software relies on volunteers to create and distribute patches for security vulnerabilities. These patches may or may not be rigorously tested before release and therefore might create further vulnerabilities or software incompatibilities.

It is important to note that Open Source Software is now a major source of security vulnerabilities. Computer Emergency Response Team reported that open source and Linux software accounted for 16 out of 29 security advisories for the first 10 months of 2002. During the same time, Microsoft accounted for 7 out of the 29 security advisories.

A recent report from Aberdeen Group, based on CERT advisories, states that "Contrary to popular wisdom, UNIX- and Linux-based systems are vulnerable to viruses, Trojan horses, and worms."

Choice and Compatibility:  Today, governments typically want software that works with a wide range of hardware devices and which can communicate with other software applications. An important consideration when choosing an operating system is its ability to interoperate well with a variety of other stand alone in-house systems. In recognition of these mixed environments, Microsoft has made a significant commitment to supporting interoperability across platforms. In fact we have close to 22,000 readily available applications today on the Microsoft platform—a fact that can’t be challenged by any other software alternative. However, interoperability to support heterogeneous environments presents one of the most difficult challenges for Open Source Software.

Compatibility often is more a function of whether a piece of software is "off the shelf" or custom software. Open Source Software tends to fall more into the custom software category while proprietary software tends to rely more on the "off the shelf" model. In general, the greater the level of customisation, the less likely a piece of software is to work with a broad range of hardware and software.

Innovation roadmap: Information about a vendor’s technology roadmap is very important to government decision makers who need to anticipate and plan ahead for future computing needs. It is imperative that the innovation roadmap be predictable and driven by customer needs and not by the personal fancy of a handful of developers.

In this context, Microsoft has a long record of advances in its operating system. Windows continues to be engineered for the long term. Part of this engineering process is our ongoing effort to synchronize that engineering with anticipated customer requirements.

This implies that government IT departments can keep announced future capabilities in mind as they design, build, and upgrade their systems and need not spend precious resources creating additional solutions.

Because Open Source Software has no clearly defined central planning organization that sets the direction of the operating system kernel, it is more difficult to know the capabilities that will be available in the near and long term. For instance, vendors of individual Linux distributions are free to enhance the kernel to meet their needs. However, there is no guarantee that the enhancements will be accepted into the main Linux code tree, leading to possible "forking" and application compatibility problems. In addition, the Linux vendors have not committed anywhere near the resources of Microsoft to ensure the consistent and timely delivery of future improvements.

I would like to sum up by saying that based on the above parameters—cost, value, transparency, security, reliability, compatibility and innovation the Windows platform undoubtedly offers inherent advantages over Open Source Software for the government audience.

Additionally, ours is a proven – tried and tested- platform which is based on customer feedback and helps customers derive maximum value through their IT investment. Another undisputable advantage that our platform offers is the rich ecosystem support in terms of the applications availability, device compatibility and after sales support. This ensures that our government customers get the richest platform experience possible.

Moreover, in today’s challenging times when the basic issue facing governments is to accelerate mass IT penetration and break the digital divide, why shouldn’t it be using the best quality and most trusted software as opposed to an obscure free alternative - which has no long-term road map and no single commercial entity responsible for its development. Also, if rural India wants to use PCs, it should get the best, tried and tested software with the widest possible range of applications, available more often in the local language.

With pure logic to support the above statement, the best choice for governments undoubtedly remains Windows.

Vijay Kapur, National Technology Officer Microsoft Corporation India Private limited

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