New CIO, New Outlook For GNU/Linux In German Government

“The German federal government is appointing a new chief ICT commissioner. Klaus Vitt, head of IT at Germany’s Federal Employment Agency, is to become the new IT Commissioner of the federal government and Secretary of State at the Ministry of the Interior.”
 
See Germany appoints new CIO
 
“Shortly after switching all of its 13,000 public internet information workstations from Windows NT to Linux, the Federal Employment Office (BA) issued an interim report. According to an announcement by Klaus Vitt, CIO for the BA, the switch to open source software will, ‘allow the BA to react with flexibility to new technological developments. In the future, a broad range of software will be available to the BA that it can use to access various internet media, and to ensure optimal internet communication for its clients.'”
 
See Federal Employment Office switches to Linux (2008)
 
“Under pressure of rising costs, the German Federal Employment Agency was looking for a more efficient way to provide critical services. With key applications now being run on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, the employment agency is benefiting from lower investment costs for hardware and savings of around 80 percent for database servers. In addition, these more efficient servers reduce energy consumption by more than 80 percent.”
 
See German Federal Employment Agency Saves Money and Energy with Open Server Architecture and SUSE (2014)It always helps adoption of FLOSS and GNU/Linux to have an inside man who loves to pinch pennies. Thus it is appropriate in 2015 to have such a guy rise to the top of IT in the German government in 2015. He’s been rolling out GNU/Linux and saving money in the Federal Employment Office for the last decade and I have no doubt he will continue for the next. It will be interesting to see his influence spread to other departments.