Open Source Software can Improve the Health of the Bank Balance - The Beaumont Hospital Experience

This study describes the implementation of open source software in a large Irish public sector organization, Beaumont Hospital. The findings reveal a radical shift in open source deployment from invisible horizontal infrastructure systems to highly visible vertical applications. The case study describes the implementation of these systems, the difficulties encountered, and also the benefits in terms of astonishing cost savings of ?13m over 5 years. . Given that Beaumont were already receiving academic pricing discounts for many of their original proprietary closed source applications, the savings for a typical commercial organization could be even higher. The study also identifies the primary drivers in the move to OSS, namely principle, pragmatism and practicality. The study also indicates how a typical company can contribute back to the OSS community in their own unique way, by distributing applications form their own domain of expertise, rather than having to make detailed code contributions to the original code base.