The TMP Company is a small, cost-conscious firm with multiple PCs, many of which need to run office productivity applications only occasionally. Rather than pay high Microsoft Office license fees per computer, TMP saved thousands of dollars by equipping them all with the StarOfficeTM Suite from Sun. TMP learned that great value was only the most immediate benefit of the StarOffice suite. In conjunction with Linux, it now allows TMP to run multiple applications without crashing.

The TMP Company is a Seattle-based full-service distributor serving the watch, clock and jewelry industries. In 2000, TMP learned about the StarOffice suite and its potential to help save costs.

"Due to the nature of our business, we need a lot of occasional-use PCs around the office," explained Tim Payne, vice president of TMP. "In fact, we have twice as many PCs as we do employees -- one machine in the front office for customer demos, one in the back office for bookkeeping, and so forth. Well, Microsoft insists on a fixed, high cost per seat for Office regardless of how old and slow the PC is or how often it's used -- a policy we don't think is very smart."

Cost was not the only problem TMP had with Microsoft. "You're supposed to be able to run multiple applications at the same time, but I learned better than to try that a long time ago," said Payne. "Every time I started up a new application I was holding my breath, waiting for a crash. Then a message would come up saying the crash was my fault. When I tried calling their tech support, I'd get charged hundreds of dollars for them to ask if I was running any non-Microsoft applications."

TMP switched from Windows to Linux, which quickly solved several of their problems. However, they still faced the high cost of Microsoft Office until they learned about StarOffice Suite.

"When I first read about StarOffice suite in a Linux magazine, I immediately said 'Wow!' and downloaded it," Payne continued. "Right away we were impressed. It came up right away. We found its look and feel comfortable and easy to use. The more we used it, the more impressed we became. It's very well designed and runs great on Linux. It opens up Word documents easily. Now we can run multiple applications with confidence that the machine won't be crashing on us. Since customers can replicate StarOffice on all their computers at no cost, we proceeded to load it up on all of them. Now whenever we need to do something on any machine, we know the full suite is available there and the software police won't be coming to get us."

"All things considered, we saved over $1,000 per employee by switching to StarOffice suite," Payne concluded. [...read more...]

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