Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is an analysis meant to uncover all lifetime costs that follow from owning certain kinds of assets. Ownership brings purchase costs, of course, but ownership can also bring costs for installing, deploying, operating, upgrading, and maintaining the same assets. For this reason, TCO is sometimes called life cycle cost analysis. For many kinds of acquisitions, TCO analysis finds a very large difference between purchase price and total long term cost, especially when v…