City Government (City Council) in Los Angeles agreed yesterday unanimously (12-0) to adopt Google services in e-mail, instant messaging, calendar, and the like for 30 000 employees. The agreement is worth 7.25 million US. dollars.
Google won out with their tenders in sharp competition with, among other things Microsoft.
Tender from the United States' second largest city, has great prestige, and has been followed closely by the entire US. IT industry.
Google's victory will inspire others to go in new directions, the recurring theme in many newspaper comments.
It must be emphasized that the Los Angeles contract does not apply to Google Apps in general: The city's employees are still equipped with Microsoft Office.
The decision was made to a disclaimer. One of the agency ends that there were skeptical of the security and privacy in Google's Net Cloud, Paul Koretz, proposed an amendment to guarantee the city a pre-determined compensation if the security were to burst.
The city's project manager David Barber says he expects that Contracting Party to accept this amendment. Google has everything to gain from demonstrating that the ability to deliver secure and reliable services to large communities.
Koretz said after the vote that he supports the introduction of Gmail and other services, even if he is still unsure whether the system has been tested sufficiently.
Los Angeles will start immediately with a pilot project, and expects to have switched completely to Google services by the end of June. In particular, the security of LAPD care units (police) will not be on Google before they are convinced that the system responds to their demands.
Microsoft's alternative was a separate Net Cloud implementation of their systems for e-mail, appointments and instant messages.
The loss of the contract with Los Angeles is a backlash after several victories in similar proposals, including from Glaxo Smith Kline, Coca Cola, Ohio State University and the city of Carlsbad in the state of California.
In Los Angeles, Google solution replaces the current implementation of GroupWise from Novell, which no longer meet the requirements of stability and response time. Novell explained that the city has not upgraded to the latest version of GroupWise. Los Angeles has used GroupWise since 2002.
Before the vote was presented calculations to show that the Google solution will save the city for around 5 million dollars in service costs over five years, as well as making it possible to reduce staffing in the IT department with nine full-time positions.
