It can be a bit time consuming, but it pays for itself," Fry said.

"If you're only going to buy a dozen licences then you'll never get an ROI, but if you buy in volume then you're better off shopping around."

Asked about using open source software to further reduce cost, Fry said that while he is not "closed to open source" he is "very conscious" of the cost of migrating.

"I'm cautiously open to it and we do use open source software in three different spots in the organization [but] it's just another set of software to be evaluated," he said.

The department's existing use of open source is not in "big ticket items", but it is used on backend systems for data transfer.