Switchfast Blog: The Future of IT
Google's government contract establishes foothold in Cloud Services Market
Wednesday, February 16, 2011 by George Tobin
As Reuters
reported in December, Google has won a crucial contract to
provide Google Application cloud services - such as business
e-mail, calendar, document management, and websites - to the U.S.
General Services Administration.
While the initial contract amount is small (given Google's
behemoth scale) at less than $7 million, the company stands to
benefit both symbolically (from landing a high-visibility
opportunity) and from the opportunity to gain future government
work.
The Google Applications platform, better known as Google Apps,
offers the functionality of traditional software like Microsoft
Office or Outlook without the onsite hardware investment, licensing
costs, or ongoing support costs and is usually priced at an annual
per-user flat fee. The service requires very few onsite resources,
as all of the necessary computing "horsepower" is housed on
Google's servers. This is similar to the way services like Hotmail
or Gmail work for users, but with improved privacy, functionality,
and speed.
Microsoft's cloud services allow businesses to host the
application on their own servers - providing an added level of
control and privacy - but at this early juncture, it's not clear
whose offering is the winner yet.
Is your business considering Google or Microsoft's cloud
services? Have you made the switch yet? Let us know in the comments
below!
Until next time -
George Tobin
Switchfast Technologies
Chicago IT Support &
Consulting
Rochester IT Support &
Consulting
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