CERN, the famous scientific lab where the web was born, tells us why it's ditching Microsoft and helping others do the same
- Respected scientific research center CERN said this week that it is yanking out all of its Microsoft software after the software giant increased the prices it was charging by 10-fold.
- A CERN IT professional gave Business Insider more details about what CERN is internally calling the Microsoft ALternatives project (or MALt)
- The CERN IT pro said that it hopes MALt will help others ditch Microsoft, too.
- As part of this, CERN employees contributing to open source software projects, adding new features they need, to make them viable alternatives to commercial software.
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CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is one of the world's largest and most respected scientific research centers.
Today, it's known for the Large Hadron Collider, but back in 1989, British scientist Tim Berners-Lee worked there when he invented a little thing called the World Wide Web.
For 20 years, Microsoft has been one of CERN's major IT suppliers but earlier this week, CERN announced on a blog post that, thanks to a 10-fold price hike by Microsoft, CERN was yanking out all its Microsoft software, a project it calls the Microsoft Alternatives project, or (MAlt). CERN employs around 2,500 people, and collaborates with more than 12,200 and Microsoft told CERN it must pay increased per-user software pricing.
We reached out to CERN with several questions about what Microsoft products they were replacing, why they started this project a year ago, and why Microsoft jacked-up prices on them.
Tim Smith, CERN's head of Collaboration, Devices and Applications Group in the IT department was happy to answer these questions and more.
The TLDR version: CERN started the project a year ago as part of efforts to move to the cloud and to upgrade/change their email system (which currently uses Microsoft). Microsoft decided the organization no longer met its definition of an academic institute and thus no longer qualified for the discounts it offers to educational facilities.
And he said that CERN has every intention of showing other organizations how to replace Microsoft software with alternatives.
Here's the full Q&A:
Business Insider: What Microsoft products do you use and which ones do you plan on replacing?
Tim Smith: We will be reviewing the entire spectrum of commercial products used and have started with some products currently used to address core needs such as Exchange [Microsoft's email product], Skype For Business, Office, Project & Visio, Active Directory and ADFS.
BI: Your blog post said your Microsoft enterprise contract changed in March, 2019, but the MALt project began a year ago. Why were you looking to replace Microsoft a year ago?
TS: The cloud-ification trend has led commercial suppliers over recent years to review existing site-wide deals, bundles, and user counting schemes. So for a while now we have been investigating alternative ways to build more dynamic services with less critical single product dependencies.
Some of the projects aimed specifically at Microsoft alternatives are just now coming to fruition, and specifically it was time for us to start the initial migration phase for our mail system. Hence it was important to communicate internally about MAlt to our users, so on 12th June we published an article in the CERN bulletin (a fortnightly newsletter to update our community regarding the latest news, official communications and announcements from CERN).
BI: Did Microsoft give you any reason for increasing prices on you by 10x?
TS: The trigger for change was Microsoft's decision that we no longer meet their criteria of an academic institute. Fitting us into any traditional per-user business model is always a challenge since our services cater to a vast community of visiting scientists and engineers.
BS: Will you be sharing what you learn with the greater research community and public, so others who want to ditch expensive commercial products can do it and learn from what you did?
TS: Sharing is part of our mission, and we do it with a passion! (CERN has helped pioneer initiatives such as open hardware, open access publishing, open data and not to forget releasing the World Wide Web under an open source licence in 1994!)
For MAlt in particular we are keen to use existing open source tools and to contribute enhancements if needed, and otherwise to develop open source solutions where there are gaps. The strength of open source projects derives from the communities that flourish around them, so we most certainly have that in mind.
Microsoft has not yet responded to Business Insider's request for comment.