Los Angeles Goes Google Apps With Microsoft Cash

Dan Jones writes "The Los Angeles City Council has approved a US$7.25 million, five-year deal with Google in which the city will adopt Gmail and other Google Apps. Interestingly, just over $1.5 million for the project will come from the payout of a 2006 class action lawsuit between the City and Microsoft (Microsoft paid $70 million three years ago to settle the suit by six California counties and cities who alleged that Microsoft used its monopoly position to overcharge for software). The city will migrate from Novell GroupWise e-mail servers. For security, Google will provide a new separate data environment called 'GovCloud' to store both applications and data in a completely segregated environment that will only be used by public agencies. This GovCloud would be encrypted and 'physically and logically segregated' from Google's standard applications. Has cloud computing stepped up to prime time?"

Cloud?

[truthsearch]

Has cloud computing stepped up to prime time?

No. Someone's just getting a dedicated data center hosting scalable web apps. Nothing new.

Of all the places on the interwebs, I would hope /. could refrain from the marketing babble.

Re:Wha?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It turns out that chronology makes the world a much more comprehensible place:

At times A through B, LA purchased software from Microsoft. At time C, which is after times A and B, they sued, asserting that Microsoft used their market power in the interval between A and B to overcharge. They one. At time D, which is after A, B, and C, they purchased a product from a competitor which was not offered in the A to B interval.

Answering TFS's Question...

[rwv]

Has cloud computing stepped up to prime time?

I hear "cloud computing" discussed and wonder what it really means. It seems like it's just a notion of a server connected to many clients serving data to client applications (which isn't a new concept). However, my impression was that "cloud computing" was many clients connected to each other serving each other content.

Let's see what Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] has to say about it

Cloud computing services often provide common business applications online that are accessed from a web browser, while the software and data are stored on the servers.

Okay... cloud computing is "business application accessed from a web browser". Well, in the respect I think the deal might be a good step for cloud computing.

Re:Answering TFS's Question...

[Anonymous Coward]

NIST, the folks responsible for all the standard we use every day keeps track of a slowly evolving definition of cloud computing that seems to cover all the bases:

http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/SNS/cloud-computing/index.html

Re:Monopoly position to overcharge for their softw

[Anonymous Coward]

True.

But, IIRC, most of these cases had to do with Microsoft strong-arming OEMS (Dell,HP, etc) by forcing them to only ship Windows and Office on their computers.

Re:Gmail is not ready.

[godztempus]

"This GovCloud would be encrypted and 'physically and logically segregated' from Google's standard applications." I'm sure the gmail outages are the reason for this part. Physically and logically segregated means that if gmail goes down, GovCloud won't. If your exchange team had to manage the email for millions of users they would be having more outages then gmail.

Re:Why segregate?

[stocke2]

Having your own email servers, if you loose internet you still can't send/receive email, so no big deal

You can always pop/imap your email from google and can use offline access with google email/calendar/docs.

We changed over to google apps here at work and the offline access has been good for us here.

Re:Monopoly position to overcharge for their softw

[stocke2]

actually they did not make a superior product, go back and read all the findings. They did in fact use their position to destroy others before they could compete, which is fine, unless you have a monopoly.

Re:Gmail is not ready.

[skgrey]

Umm...the GovCloud is running the same software as standard gmail, no? The outages have been from issues within the gmail code (issues with the contacts plugin, issues with new mailbox code) as well as standard routing issues (I believe it was a core switch that had a bad route at one point), not from the amount of users. I think it was a DOS and a number of users issue once out of all of those. Having this segregated from Gmail isn't going to make as much of a difference as you think it's going to.