CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is one of the largest and most respected scientific-research centers.
Today, it's known for the Large Hadron Collider, but in 1989, the 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 in a blog post that, thanks to a tenfold price hike by Microsoft, CERN was yanking out all of its Microsoft software, a project it calls the Microsoft Alternatives project (MAlt). CERN employs about 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 which 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 TL;DR version: CERN started the project a year ago as part of efforts to move to the cloud and upgrade its email system (which 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 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 10 times?
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.
When asked for comment on CERNs plans, a Microsoft spokesperson said that the company believes in applying its licensing fee policies consistently:
"We are committed to a consistent application of eligibility requirements for our different licensing options. When we find exceptions to this policy during our ongoing audit processes for compliance, we work directly with customers to ensure their transition to new licensing programs is as seamless as possible."
