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.
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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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Gartner Fellows Neil MacDonald and David Mitchell Smith spoke with Ray Ozzie, chief software architect at Microsoft, “to discuss his vision for cloud computing, and the impact on enterprise computing and the IT industry.” Their conversation has been published as a Gartner RAS Core Research Note (G00172235), and made available for public consumption via a Microsoft reprint.
Published Key Findings:
- “Ozzie’s (and thus, Microsoft’s) vision of cloud computing emphasizes hybrid enterprise/cloud computing, where organizations choose when and where computing takes place locally versus in cloud-based infrastructure, and emphasizes that the on-premises and cloud-based solutions work seamlessly together.
- As with early encryption issues, Ozzie believes that security and privacy issues will be addressed as the industry matures in a combination of legislative advances, as well as industry cooperation.
- Ozzie’s vision for cloud computing includes system infrastructure, an application platform and finished applications being delivered as a service.
- Microsoft is investing in its own data centers because it must in order to provide its consumer-based services. It believes it is helping to lead the industry in providing innovations in data center architectures.
- Ozzie believes the future of cloud computing is in the experience delivered via a browser across multiple devices — mobile, PC and TV-type screens — which is a vision he refers to as "three screens and a cloud." “
The entire report is well-worth the read.
A quick excerpt on Ozzie’s hybrid model vision:
"Ozzie: I believe in a hybrid model. I fundamentally, deeply believe in a hybrid model at the experience side and at the back-end side.
At the back-end side, it depends on the size of enterprise and the workload, as well as the segment of the enterprise and whether it is highly regulated or whatever. The decisions regarding what to keep on-premises versus what to distribute into the cloud will vary dramatically. Very small businesses will put almost everything into the cloud. Very large businesses will put all their infrastructural systems, such as mail, phone systems and document management, into the cloud. Enterprise applications that have high integration requirements and a lot of legacy issues will stay on-premises. What happens in the middle is a mix."
“…But again, it’s a hybrid architecture. If you don’t have the center, then you can’t rendezvous. You can’t find each other. You can’t connect in any way, shape or form. However, if you don’t have the edge, then you don’t have the agility. You pay for ingress and egress when you don’t have to.”
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David Mitchell Smith,
Gartner,
microsoft,
Neil MacDonald,
Ray Ozzie
Posted by brenda michelson at 9:32 am in Cloud Watch, cloud computing environment (cce), data center advances, provider positions, software architecture | Permalink
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Today’s Wall Street Journal had a short Dow Jones Newswire piece entitled "Microsoft Exec: Customers Embracing "Cloud Computing". The lead-in:
“Corporate customers are switching to "cloud"-based technology more rapidly than Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) expected, a senior executive at the company said Monday.
"People are embracing cloud computing faster than we anticipated," Stephen Elop, who heads Microsoft’s business division – which includes the ubiquitous Office tools – said in an interview.”
The interesting thing though, was the article went on to suggest that Microsoft finds itself chasing Google, and that is what drove Microsoft’s recent price reductions:
“Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft is ramping up competition, offering hosted versions of familiar services like email and Office for its corporate customers. Last week, it cut the price of its Exchange Online email services. The move was seen as in part a reaction to some accounts Google has won recently, such as a contract to run 30,000 email accounts for employees of the City of Los Angeles.”
This of course, Microsoft denied, and attributed the price reduction to economies of scale:
“Elop said wider take-up of services like hosted email had prompted Microsoft to introduce the price cuts, because Microsoft was increasingly able to offer such services at large scale without impacting profitability. He said Microsoft was confident it could offer such services profitably on an ongoing basis. Some analysts have expressed concern that the need to compete with rivals could lower margins.”
—-
Why is interesting? The early leaders in cloud computing, both in innovation and offering adoption, are not traditional Enterprise and Agency IT Vendors. Rather, they are a search company and a bookseller. And neither is going away.
Tagged as:
Amazon,
Google,
microsoft,
WSJ
Posted by brenda michelson at 5:51 pm in Cloud Watch, SaaS | Permalink
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Alistair Croll is interviewing Amitabh Srivastava, Senior Vice President, Windows Azure, Microsoft. Amitabh is responsible for Azure, his background is core O/S. Once again, I’ve captured some, but not all of the conversation.
AC: Are you faced now with open cloud/closed cloud dilemma?
AS: Big advantage in cloud is centralized control. Cloud provider picks the hardware, don’t have to worry about accommodating old equipment and software. This control and homogeneity drives down the cost. However, still want to build a very general purpose platform. Microsoft views cloud as extension of enterprise. Developer can choose how to write the apps for the 3 screens – pc, phone, tv – in the environment that makes most sense. We are still 5 minutes into the first quarter of cloud.
more >>
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Alistar Croll,
Amitabh Srivastava,
archives,
Azure,
Interop,
live coverage,
microsoft
Posted by brenda michelson at 7:25 pm in Blog, provider positions | Permalink
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Introduced as “one of our more unusual sessions”. Session abstract:
“State government a hotbed of technology innovation – huh? But that’s exactly right. The Ohio Dept of Transportation has harnessed extensive infrastructure (thousands of sensors, historical & police data, etc.) and cloud services to create a rich solution. Through a series of demos, this session will showcase for delegates how the Buckeye State has created a rich user experiences for residents, visitors and internal staff conducting detailed traffic analysis. In doing so, we will see how the IT team looked beyond just using cloud services, to combining with what’s on premise, and then becoming a supplier of these services to others. We will also share follow-up resources that attendees can review for further reference and follow-up, including access to code libraries, code snippets from the discussion. Join the two presenters and see for yourself the combination of on-premise & services in action.”
Session speakers are Brian H. Prince, an Architect Evangelist with Microsoft and Steve Milroy,a solution architect with OnTerra Systems. The ODOT architect is home in Ohio, economy & travel restrictions. Sound familiar?
The session is doing a demo of buckeye traffic, a publicly available site. more >>
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archives,
CCExpo,
live coverage,
mapping,
microsoft,
Ohio,
OnTerra,
Virtual Earth
Posted by brenda michelson at 7:47 pm in Blog, adoption, use cases | Permalink
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Microsoft’s Cloud Strategy. The speaker is “Yousef Khalidi is a Distinguished Engineer in the Windows Azure team at Microsoft. He is responsible for several aspects of the platform, centered on the goal of building a low-cost, automated, large-scale computing system, using commodity hardware, with efficiently managed shared resources.”
more >>
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archives,
Azure,
CCExpo,
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Yousef Khalidi
Posted by brenda michelson at 5:54 pm in Blog, provider positions | Permalink
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