French officials from the police organization Gendarmerie Nationale reported recently that they’ve saved millions of dollars by migrating their desktop infrastructure away from Windows to Ubuntu. The Gendarmerie started moving away from Windows in 2005 when they replaced MS Office with OpenOffice across their entire organization.

As we previously reported, back in 2006, when Microsoft released Vista, the Gendarmerie decided to migrate to Linux instead. Currently, they are running Ubuntu on about 5,000 workstations with long term plans to have their entire organization (90,000 workstations) running Ubuntu by 2015.

In the report, the organization discussed the fact that they have been able to reduce their budget by a jaw-dropping 70 percent without losing any of their functionality. This is a huge win for Ubuntu, which has been gradually taking over market share from Windows for years.

[via Arstechnica]