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By Michael Eggebrecht
When the Los Angeles City Council voted last October to move its e-mail system from Novell to Gmail and its office applications from Microsoft to Google Apps, it was seen as a victory not just for Google’s enterprise efforts, but for the cloud computing model as a whole. But for Los Angeles CTO Randi Levin, the deal was another kind of victory --“I get to survive this year.”
With her city facing a $400 million deficit in 2010, Levin, who spoke at last week’s Gov2.0 Expo in Washington D.C., has seen her IT department’s annual budget shrink from $120 million to $80 million. That makes the $5 million that she’ll save over the next three to five years by moving to the cloud even more significant. Essentially, said Levin, it means her organization will be able to continue to work on projects.
For Levin, the initiative, which got its start about a year and a half ago, came down to a fairly simple technology question. Most of the people in the city were disappointed with Novell, services were declining and an upgrade wouldn’t have met all its needs. And then there were the potential cost savings to be found in the cloud.
But the Los Angeles media turned the initiative into a much bigger issue, said Levin, playing up the competition between Google and Microsoft, which had also submitted a proposal to provide the city’s e-mail system. “If you took the politics out, we probably would have been done by now,” she said, adding that 10,500 users have been migrated thus far, with another 20,000 or so moving by the fall.
Users had complaints about the city’s Novell system, including inadequate calendaring capabilities, incompatibility with Apple’s iPhone, a small e-mail inbox, and the need to archive frequently. The IT department also had its problems. The system -- GroupWise 7.0 for most of the city -- ran on 90 servers and was down frequently. The data center was looking at a $30 million investment, and there wasn’t the money or appetite to do it. And upgrading to GroupWise 8.0 wouldn’t have meant much of an increase in functionality.
That’s not to mention the department’s staffing issues. Due to position cuts, early retirement and employee migration to sister agencies, IT has lost 30 percent of its staff. And as in many cities in the current climate, there has been no acknowledgment that service levels can’t be sustained.
After looking at cost, time to implement and functionality, “for us, the answer turned out to be cloud computing,” said Levin. So, Los Angeles signed a five-year, $7.25 million contract with Google and its partner, systems integrator CSC, for e-mail, calendaring and contacts, and the Google Apps suite of office applications.
But while the city council voted unanimously to adopt the platform, there were more than a few concerns expressed, even after the vote. According to the LA Times, one city councilman, Paul Koretz, noted that “it’s unclear if this is cutting edge, or the edge of a cliff and we're about to step off.”
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