The Chicago Tribune is reporting that “Orlando became one of the first cities in America to switch all of its employees to Google e-mail.” The savings are impressive:
“If Orlando were to keep its current system, city officials estimate it would cost $133 a year for each of its 3,000 employees — or $399,000 — including annual software licenses.
Google is charging $45.50 per user, or $136,500. In return, everyone from city planners to police officers will use a Web-based e-mail system similar to Google’s popular Gmail, but without the advertisements that support the free consumer version. Google servers will store all city e-mail and run the application, and Google technicians — not city employees — will make sure it runs smoothly.
"The costs and IT support are someone else’s nightmare, and that’s what we’re paying for," Chief Financial Officer Rebecca Sutton said.”
More interesting is the confidence, dare I say “trust”, in using a cloud-based solution:
“[Google’s] Lock said Google will archive Orlando records, which must be kept and accessible under state public-records law, in "super-secret data centers."
And Cross [Orlando’s Chief Information Officer] said he’s confident city records, including sensitive law-enforcement and legal documents, will be safe from loss or cyberattack. Google has greater security resources, from people to money, than Orlando could muster on its own.
Besides, Cross said, the city last year contacted other e-mail providers, including Microsoft and IBM, about moving to the cloud.
"They gave us pricing that couldn’t compete with Google," he said.”
While the Los Angeles Google deal is much better known, Orlando led the way:
“Los Angeles became Google’s crown jewel in October, when that city approved a $7.25 million e-mail contract with the Internet giant, but Los Angeles has not yet moved its 30,000 employees to the Google system.
Google cited its deal with Orlando, which had already been signed, in its pitch to Los Angeles.”
In a reversal of classic technology adoption patterns, government agencies are cutting the path to cloud computing. Interesting times.
Tagged as:
Google,
GoogleApps,
government,
IBM,
microsoft
Posted by brenda michelson at 4:41 pm in Cloud Watch, SaaS, adoption, business capability offering, use cases | Permalink
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Positive cloud adoption metrics from reddit:
“As most of you know, we moved reddit to EC2 back in May of 2009. Our experience there has been excellent so far. Since we moved to EC2, the number of unique users has gone up 50%, and pageviews are up more than 100%. To support this growth, we have added 30% more ram and 50% more CPU, yet because of Amazon’s constant price reductions, we are actually paying less per month now than when we started.”
The reddit blog post was in response to opinions that reddit’s site had slowed since the move to Amazon. The post continues with a “nerd alert” section on the volume-based cause of the slowdown, and described the necessary changes to reddit’s database and caching architecture.
I won’t replicate the description here, but suffice it to say, scale doesn’t guarantee performance.
Tagged as:
Amazon,
EC2,
metrics,
reddit
Posted by brenda michelson at 4:09 pm in Cloud Watch, adoption, elasticity & scale, performance & reliability, use cases | Permalink
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Session Abstract: Is your organization considering cloud computing? Are you tired of hearing about simplistic (email and calendaring), enterprise irrelevant (Twitter, Facebook), and extreme (Google Datacenter) use cases? You aren’t alone. In this session, government and enterprise practitioners will discuss the cloud computing use cases they are considering, actively pursuing, and rejecting. In addition to the use case specifics, the panelists will share insights on financial benefits, true implementation costs, assessing and managing risk, governance, standards and their cloud computing wish list.
Moderators: David W. Cearley, Gartner and Richard Soley, OMG / SOA Consortium
Panelists: Clark Dorman of Next Century, Andy Lapkin of Kelley Blue Book, Joseph Larizza of Fieldpoint Private Bank & Trust
This is the first of two SOA Consortium Panels at Gartner AADI. The second is SOA Success Stories on Wednesday. As SOA-C Program Director, I helped organize this panel. My fingerprints are all over the session abstract. more >>
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Gartner,
use cases
Posted by brenda michelson at 6:33 pm in Blog, use cases | Permalink
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Cloud Computing in Government: A Progress Report, moderated by Robert Ames of IBM
Panelists:
- Doug Bourgeois, Director, National Business Center, Dept. of the Interior
- Casey Coleman, CIO, GSA
- William (Bill) Turnbull, Associate CIO for Advanced Technology and Systems Integration, Department of Energy
Robert Ames of IBM opens, sets context for panel and quips on the 4th Cloud Delivery model, “Hype as a Service”, via David Vap.
Casey Coleman, opens saying hard to give progress report at this early stage, but there is a lot of momentum for cloud computing in the government. A big part of that momentum is the recently launched Apps.gov site.
more >>
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1105,
Apps.gov,
archives,
DoE,
government,
GSA,
Hadoop,
IBM,
live coverage,
NBC,
private cloud
Posted by brenda michelson at 3:47 pm in Blog, adoption, use cases | Permalink
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What Elasticity Really Means
Moderator:
Ian Rae, CEO, Syntenic
Speakers:
- Jon Beck, SVP Sales and Client Services, OpSource, Inc.
- Scott Clark, Director of Engineering Infrastructure, Broadcom
- Josh Litwin, President and CEO, Memento Press
- Geir Magnusson, Consulting Architect, Platform, Gilt
- Chad Swartz, Senior Manager, IT Operations, Preferred Hotel Group
Finally, some cloud computing practitioners, small business, enterprise, web retail and technology – Memento Press, Preferred Hotel Group, Gilt and Broadcom.
more >>
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archives,
Broadcom,
Chad Swartz,
Geir Magnusson,
Gilt,
Ian Rae,
Interop,
Jon Beck,
Josh Litwin,
live coverage,
Memento Press,
OpSource,
Preffered Hotel Group,
Scott Clark,
Syntenic
Posted by brenda michelson at 2:17 pm in Blog, elasticity & scale, use cases | Permalink
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This morning’s focus in on the business case for cloud computing, ROI & migration. "What’s the promise? Despite the downsides, there’s little doubt that on-demand computing services are the future of both consumer and enterprise IT.”
First up in a panel discussion: The Case for Cloud Infrastructure: On-Demand Economics
Moderator:
John Willis, Owner, Zabovo
Panelists:
- Paul Mockapetris, Chairman and Chief Scientist, Nominium, Inc.
- James Urquhart, Cisco, Technology Strategist, Data Center Solutions team
- Neil Cohen, Director of Product Marketing, Akamai
- Joe Weinman, Strategic Solution Sales, AT&T Signature Client Group
more >>
Tagged as:
Akamai,
archives,
AT&T,
Cisco,
Interop,
James Urquhart,
Joe Weinman,
John Willis,
live coverage,
Neil Cohen,
Nominium,
Paul Mockapetris
Posted by brenda michelson at 1:09 pm in Blog, economics, elasticity & scale, use cases | Permalink
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