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
| Comments(0)
| Trackback URL
In IBM’s November 2009 SOA Newsletter, Fill Bowen, Program Manager responsible for Smart SOA in IBM Software Group, discusses the relationship between SOA and Cloud Computing, and shares prerequisites for providing services in a cloud and consuming services in a cloud.
The newsletter emphasizes that SOA and Cloud Computing are complements. SOA is an architectural style, while Cloud Computing is a deployment model. These concepts can come together in the design of the cloud computing environment:
"’SOA is an architectural style for building applications, loosely coupled, allowing composition,’ says Jerry Cuomo, CTO of IBM’s WebSphere business. ‘Can we build a datacenter infrastructure on SOA principles? Yes, and that’s the cloud, so it’s a service-oriented infrastructure,’ he adds. ‘It’s taking that architectural principle of SOA and applying it to an infrastructure.’" – InfoWorld, “The cloud-SOA connection”
In discussing the SOA-Cloud Computing relationship, Fill offers a helpful analogy using books and a library:
“An interesting analogy for cloud and SOA is to think of books in a library. The books represent the services that customers can access once the library acquires them, and the library building represents the cloud where people come to check out the books/services. Books are reusable, and several books might make up a series or topic. Someone writes the book once and it is reused many times.
Using our analogy of books in the library, there are two components to consider when thinking about services in a cloud environment. One is the providing of services (books) to the cloud (library). And the other is the consuming (checking out) of those services (books). Each has different requirements.”
Read the article to learn of the prerequisites for providing and consuming services in a cloud.
[Disclosure: IBM is not a direct client of my firm, Elemental Links, however IBM is a founding sponsor of the SOA Consortium, which is a client.]
Tagged as:
Fillmore Bowen,
IBM,
soa
Posted by brenda michelson at 11:11 am in Cloud Watch, cloud computing environment (cce), fundamentals, governance, provider positions, services architecture, virtualization | Permalink
| Comments(0)
| Trackback URL
In a September article, published on AlwaysOn, Irving Wladawsky-Berger shares his perspective on Cloud Computing and how IT is entering its Cambrian age. While making the Cambrian age case, the article discusses a variety of computing models, and corresponding business drivers. As the article concludes, Wladawsky-Berger shares why Cloud Computing is relevant for most companies and institutions:
“At its essence, Cloud computing is about delivering a wide variety of consumer and business services to large numbers of clients around the world, as well as operating highly scalable, well engineered, efficient data centers to deliver those services with high quality and reasonable costs. That’s what businesses generally do. Clouds are thus relevant to most companies and institutions in one way or another, as providers of services, – in-house or through a Cloud service provider, – or as users, – individuals, small businesses or large enterprises, – availing yourself of the services they provide.
Once more, standards like SOA will make it possible to integrate new Cloud optimized workloads and platforms with a company’s existing infrastructure. And, once more, innovations like those described in the Warehouse-Scale Computing paper will find their way into legacy systems and applications and transform them over time.
When all is said and done, Cloud computing is introducing not just a major new model of computing, but, even more important, a new model for conducting business and interacting with clients, employees, partners and all stake-holders of the institution. This new Cambrian stage of IT is already giving rise to many new innovations, not only in classic computing but in many of the new life forms that now incorporate digital components, software, and are connected to the Internet. It is very important for companies to learn how to leverage these new innovations in their business.
In evolution, it is very costly to be left behind. So, it is very important for all companies and institutions, regardless of age or size, to figure out what this new model of computing means for their particular industry and how it best applies to them. And, like with e-business a dozen years ago, they should all get on the learning curve by doing some marketplace pilots, learn from their experiences and ensure their ability to continue evolving into the future.”
Read the full article. [Also available on Irving Wladawsky-Berger’s blog.]
Tagged as:
business drivers,
IBM,
Irving Wladawsky-Berger
Posted by brenda michelson at 11:43 am in Cloud Watch, adoption | Permalink
| Comments(0)
| Trackback URL
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 >>
Tagged as:
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
| Comments(0)
| Trackback URL
David Berlind is our Evening in the Cloud host. David says the discussion shouldn’t be about cloud computing definition, it should be about cloud computing benefits. The benefits will lead to the ‘right’ definition. Panel Format, each panelist has 8 minutes to “pitch us” as though they were visiting our organization. more >>
Tagged as:
archives,
Atmos,
Christopher Reichert,
David Berlind,
Doug Cornelius,
EMC,
enterprise2.0,
Google,
GoogleApps,
IBM,
live coverage,
Mike Feinberg,
MIT,
Rajen Sheth,
Sean Poulley
Posted by brenda michelson at 7:13 pm in Blog, adoption, compliance, cyber risk, data, provider positions | Permalink
| Comments(0)
| Trackback URL
Mike Hill, VP, IBM Cloud Services on How the CIO becomes a hero again:
‘Cloud Computing will have major impacts to the way in which IT is delivered from the data center to its many clients. For the CIO, this can be perceived as a threat to the way in which they manage data center capabilities. In reality, cloud computing offers a huge opportunity to the CIO who now has the capability to offer more responsive, scalable, and available IT services. This presentation provides a perspective on cloud computing’s future and illustrates how the CIO can appropriately leverage cloud to become the hero again.’
Cloud is culmination of capability, developed over 50 years, with a new intriguing business model. IBM is embracing Cloud Computing. Today’s talk on why CIOs should embrace it as well.
Interesting, Mike Hill was IBM’s CIO in the ‘90s, driving internal e-business initiatives. So, he should get the challenges of IT. more >>
Tagged as:
archives,
CCExpo,
IBM,
live coverage,
Mike Hill
Posted by brenda michelson at 11:13 am in Blog, provider positions | Permalink
| Comments(0)
| Trackback URL
