LA approves $7.2 million Google Apps deal
The city council in Los Angeles on Tuesday unanimously approved a $7.2 million deal to use Google Apps.
(Credit:
City of Los Angeles)
The contract is tentative, contingent on integration provider Computer Sciences Corp.'s agreement to pay a penalty in the event of a security breach, according to the Associated Press.
A week ago, the City Council's Budget and Finance Committee delayed taking action on the deal citing cost concerns.
Security concerns featured prominently in the debate over the contract, which calls for moving from Novell to Google's hosting service for e-mail and office applications.
Los Angeles police officials and the LA City Attorney's Office were concerned about the potential for security breaches with sensitive information located in the cloud as opposed to being on city servers.
LA joins the District of Columbia as one of the largest government adoptions of Google Apps. The contract is a win for Google in its competition with Microsoft for enterprise customers.
Elinor Mills covers Internet security and privacy. She joined CNET News in 2005 after working as a foreign correspondent for Reuters in Portugal and writing for The Industry Standard, the IDG News Service, and the Associated Press. E-mail Elinor. 
Even if a magical company 'XYZ' comes out with the "perfect" solution in 3 months, there will be a lot of fiscal reasons as to not consider migrating again for some time.
That said, I don't have much love for Google Apps. I think they're decent but not great. But moving to GA from Novell is an improvement nonetheless! :)
I completely agree with you and yes Google Apps is a huge improvement to Novell but not even close to Exchange or Office.
Exchange requires a CAL, and a Windows Server CAL, and Exchange server software price, Winodows server price, hardware for all of it, plus Office Cals. Plus you would need Anti-Spam and Anti-Virus for Exchange and that server it runs on.
With gmail you dont have the hardware or software cost. They own Postini which is probably the best Antimalware solution around for email.
Big time $$$$ saved.
Besides 80% of Exchange/Outlook/Office users use 20% of the applications.
Then the politicians will all use it to point blame and fingers at their political opponents over it.
It's just the way government works.
If this works for a large entity such as the City of Los Angeles, you can bet other city halls around the country will start looking too.
Just had a thought to throw out there...
Could not Google be the one that finally makes Linux on the desktop a resounding success.
Has anyone else thought of this ?
Just look at what Android has accomplished in short order. It is based on Linux.
Not an enterprise OS...just a consumer OS...Google OS.
If Chrome and Android are indicators of their potential , I think they could pull it off. I`m serious.
Google has the brains/money to do it , and PC`s would be cheaper to purchase.
If Google got behind Linux , I bet the manufacturers would take note and we would have the drivers we need in short order. The Linux code is free and open. Nobody is hiding anything.
Comments ?
if they can monitize it the way they do android (indirectly), yes undoubtedly
First the cloud. The more apps that are accessed via a browser interface the less you need Windows. Try zoho office (google it). Its much better than Google apps and shows you where Google apps will probably be soon. At my company so many current apps we use are moving to a web based front end as we upgrade them. 90% of those are shrink wrapped apps from big name vendors. Windows GUI apps are going away slowly for many things. Even MS is going to release a web based version of Office.
Second. OS X is UNIX with a gui. There is lots of drivers for printers and many other things that run on OS X. Since Linux is UNIX at its root as well, making a OS X driver say for a HP printer work on Ubuntu is not that much of a stretch. The success of OS X has paved the way for drivers of a popular Google, Linux based OS.
Same for apps. Photoshop for OS X is really Photoshop for BSD Unix. How hard would it be to port it to a Ubuntu or Google Linux OS? Adobe wont because sales today wont pay for the porting. However if a Google/Linux OS became popular they just might do that.
@Maclover1: OS X is clearly a success in terms of earning your affections, but worldwide it hasn't made much of a dent. Also, drivers from OS X and other nix flavors are not compatible. While it's not a "stretch" that one could be made from another, does Apple release source code on drivers? Hah of course not. So the OS X drivers are only useful to see that something could be done, but of course everyone knew that already.
The jury's still out on android (but I'll be getting my phone soon now that verizon's getting a couple of android devices), but to see what's happened in the last two years is amazing.
Googles got brains, and money... It's amazing..
Actually, Googles got no brains, and money... It's not that amazing...
@sanenazok
I agree with you to a point, although I think RedHat and Ubuntu are excellent in their own right. My fear is that like Apple and Cisco, Google is going to take the Open-Source Unix/Linux base and use it for their own proprietary software which will cripple it (see SIP versus SCCP for example), but gain them some leverage and more money (as if they need it) and putting them in the class with the IT monopolies like Cisco and Microsoft who control the market but make crappy products.
Here at Rackspace we believe this is a big win for the entire cloud computing industry now that a big bureaucratic organization like the Los Angeles city government see's the benefits of moving to the cloud.
<a href="http://www.rackspace.com/email_hosting/blog/2009/10/congratulations-google-your-win-in-los-angeles-is-a-win-for-us-all/">So congrats to Google and Los Angeles</a>
I left shortly there after and now support Novell Groupwise. It may not be the best system in the world but at least our engineers can work with the issues.
We think nothing now of using other social networking system such as facebook, Linkedin and MySpace so why not a ?social office? way of doing business that Google now provides. The global financial crisis has prompted demand in order to reduce costs and that has seen new players such as SocialGo and BlueSpidy positioning themselves as the next big thing. It is now only a matter of time that the best marketed product will win.
- by dcalamitie December 21, 2009 7:20 PM PST
- We migrated to Google Apps/GMail from MS Exchange and use Blackberrys. We're a small company with 25 employees, 5 blackberrys and everyone using Outlook. It is nothing less than a disaster. We thought we were going to save money, but the cost to our business and employees is awful and the Google system doesn't work properly. This is a nightmare created by some pot smoking retards... your first clue is their unique fileing system which does NOT function with every mail client in existence. And trust me, with every synchronized, nothing is synchronized with Google because every action you take isn't replicated everywhere. It's a disaster...and there is zero customer service. None, other than your third party rep. Eventually these big buyers like in this article will quickly realize the mistake they've made... and even Google Apps President says this product aint ready for prime time, maybe by the end of 2010.
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