Cloud Distribution are a Value Added Distributor focusing on the security, management and optimization of devices which access the Cloud. Visit Our Web Site www.cloud-distribution.com
GSA expects the deal, plucked out from under Microsoft, to cut its costs in half over the next five years
Google has won the General Services Administration (GSA) over to Gmail and Google Apps for Government.
The GSA, which is sorta like the federal government's quartermaster corps, said it's the first federal agency to move e-mail to a cloud-based system agency-wide.
It expects the deal, plucked out from under Microsoft, to cut its costs in half over the next five years and save it $15 million.
It will bring Google another 15,000 seats.
The agency said the widgetry better suits its mobile work force and is "in step with the administration's ‘cloud first' strategy."
The order is worth $6.7 million to Unisys which partnered with Google, Tempus Nova and Acumen Solutions. Unisys will provide the services and implement Google's software. It will tear out IBM's Lotus Notes and Domino software.
It’s no secret that Google has been eying Microsoft’s lucrative Office application franchise since the release of the premium, supported version of Google Apps a couple years ago.
Taking a page from Apple’s old playbook of using the education market to get a foot in the door, Google has scored some big wins among university and government IT buyers. They claim to have over 10 million students using Google Apps with over 3 million companies making the switch -- undoubtedly most of these are small firms, but a recent win with the State of Wyoming for over 10,000 seats shows Google triumphant in some head-to-head enterprise contests with Microsoft.
Targeting price sensitive individuals and students, who are also less attached to legacy software and used to running their lives online, was a logical opening gambit, but Google is making its next move squarely into the mainstream enterprise market with the beta release this week of their Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office.
The technology, originally acquired from DocVerse, bridges the gap between thick local applications and data, and cloud-based software and storage. Cloud Connect is a plug-in for Office 2003, 2007 and 2010 (sorry, no Mac support yet) that allows editing Office documents within the familiar confines of Word or PowerPoint, while automatically syncing them to Google’s cloud service. An interesting wrinkle is that once in the cloud, the documents inherit Google’s versioning and multi-user editing capabilities, so that several users can simultaneously edit a document, even locally within Office, without stepping on one another’s changes. (The technology is quite amazing -- those of you with a CS bent can read the full details of how they pull this off starting with the challenges, the solution and finally the optimizations).
Of course, Microsoft now has similar capabilities with Office 2010 (and Mac Office 2011) with it’s ability to save to Windows SkyDrive, but Cloud Connect certainly could drive a wedge between Office users who don’t yet have an enterprise collaboration implementation and their Microsoft account rep seeking to sell them on SharePoint of BPOS.
Many could find the hybrid approach coupling Google’s strength in online document sharing and collaboration with the familiar standby of Microsoft’s Office suite the best of both worlds. The risk for Microsoft is that once documents are in Google’s ecosystem, users could find themselves doing more and more of the content creation, editing and sharing online, rendering Office increasingly superfluous.
The cloud-based office apps archrivals have ramped up the fight for city and state government customers. Is Microsoft playing fair — or as Google argues, rigging the competition?
Judging by market share only, Google's (GOOG) Google Apps Web-based e-mail and collaboration suite hasn't begun to loosen Microsoft (MSFT) Office's tight rein on the corporate world.
But mindshare is a different story. Google has been ramping up buzz through an aggressive ad campaign and PR efforts to parade a steady stream of customers that have "gone Google".
Last week, Google had a high-profile enterprise win with Virgin America Airlines, which decided to move from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps. But the bulk of Google Apps most notable migrations are within the public sector — and now a battle for cash-strapped state government agencies is underway between Google Apps and Microsoft's BPOS (business productivity online suite) cloud service for e-mail and collaboration apps (recently rebranded as Office 365).
With tighter budgets than most corporate entities, government agencies have been more apt to move to cloud-based services that allow e-mail and documents to be stored in remote data centers.
Yet that migration has been problematic for Google. It missed a June 30 deadline to have all city employees moved to Google Apps and has struggled to meet the LAPD's strict security guidelines.
As of now, Google is not saying definitively when the City of LA migration will be finished, but the company maintains that the Google Apps migration will ultimately save Los Angeles taxpayers $5.5 million in cost savings.
City of LA stumble blocks notwithstanding, Google is hot in pursuit of state governments, taking lessons learned from LA and applying them to new contracts.
Google Gets Back on Track in Big States
According to a Google spokesperson, the company now has Google Apps government customers in 30 states. Last week, Google announced that the state of Wyoming is moving all 10,000 state government employees to Google Apps for Government and will be done with the migration in one year. Wyoming will be the first state in the country to have all state workers using Google, and it estimates the move to Google Apps will save taxpayers $1 million annually.
"The state of Wyoming's decision is the result of a two-year competitive evaluation process that included Microsoft," says Google spokesperson Andrew Kovacs.
All businesses need basic services such as e-mail hosting, document sharing, and file editing. The ways to set up these functions vary greatly, however--pick the wrong method, and you'll waste time and money.
For example, you don't need to cover the costs of your own server, since the various Google Apps for businesses shift these tools into the cloud. Plus, the online approach makes your organization more mobile, since it allows you and your staff to connect from any computer and from most smartphones.
Google's (GOOG) offerings for businesses differ from the company's consumer applications. But that's just the beginning. In this article I'll reveal tips and tweaks that can supercharge Google's tools to improve your business's productivity. Whether you are just beginning to explore Google Apps or are already a subscriber, these tricks will help you get the most from the services.
Google Apps Collaboration Tools
In addition to handling your e-mail, Google Apps can help people in your business collaborate. Many tools are available, covering everything from scheduling to document creation to videoconferencing. And though you save everything in the cloud, Google maintains good security to protect your data.
Google Calendar can help you keep appointments and share scheduling with groups. The business service is similar to the consumer version, but oriented toward clusters of employees. You'll be able to share workday details with coworkers so that they know when you're free for a possible meeting, for instance. The tool can send meeting invitations and update itself as recipients verify their attendance.
Google Docs imports and edits basic office-suite files, including .doc, .ppt, and .xls files in its word processor, presentation tool, and spreadsheet app, respectively. Multiple staffers can share documents, each person editing them without worrying about losing someone else's changes (as they might when downloading and uploading documents to a file server). Google keeps a complete history of each contributor's updates, and colleagues can even edit files at the same time. This setup can serve as a great group note-taking space for a conference call or during a presentation.
Google Sites, available in each edition of Google Apps, acts as an intranet Website. You can use it as a company bulletin board for everyone, store HR policies, highlight an upcoming event, or otherwise organize information. Google Sites and Google Docs can store any document type, so you can use them for simple file sharing, too.
Google Groups, available in the Premier Edition, acts as a center point for collaboration. Groups allow staffers to send messages within mailing lists at your company, such as a sales-team list. In addition, members can share a calendar and documents as a group. When new people join the group, they gain access to the message history as well as to the rest of the information, so that they can get up to speed with in-progress plans.
For a while now Google has been trying to diversify its revenue by going into the enterprise space with Google Apps, the productivity suite that includes Gmail, Docs, Calendar, and more.
They've gained some traction so far, having signed some multi-million dollar contracts with large corporations, government entities and universities. But to turn Google Apps into a multi-billion dollar revenue source, Google needs to address the fears organizations have about cloud security. That's why they released a Security white paper last week. The main argument is that data is stored and replicated across several disparate data-centers with multiple security levels.
Google also has a security page for schools. On it they say:
It’s your content, not ours. Your Apps content belongs to your school, or individual users at your school. Not Google.
We don’t look at your content. Google employees will only access content that you store on Apps when an administrator from your domain grants Google employees explicit permission to do so for troubleshooting.
We don’t share your content. Google does not share personal information with advertisers or other 3rd parties without your consent.
We sometimes scan content. And for very good reasons, like spam filtering, anti-virus protection, or malware detection. Our systems scan content to make Apps work better for users, enabling unique functionality like powerful search in Gmail and Google Docs. This is completely automated and involves no humans.
As a fellow cloud company we often face the same concerns over cloud security, so it’s nice to see how Google addresses them. Monitis is actually at an advantage because we performance data, not sensitive personal data. We share a similarly secure infrastructure, storing data on several disparate data-centers. Given Google’s vast network of data-centers, there’s no reason why Google Apps should be any less secure than storing data in-house, and white-papers like this one will accelerate cloud migration. You can see Monitis white papers here.
There is another feature that is just incredibly exciting about the Google approach to cloud computing
We have been writing for years about the megatrend of Cloud Computing, and have also underscored that many of the opinions on Cloud Computing reflected here are because of both hands-on experience with enterprise IT and also the use of cloud capabilities for our business at Crucial Point LLC.
The core IT capabilities of our firm is run by Google Apps. This provides us with full featured cloud computing power in online applications like email, calendars, documents, spreadsheets, chat, video, sites and an array of add-on applications like Manymoon for project management and SocialWok for business grade social networking.
Those many tools and features enable us to focus more on our mission and less on IT and they also provide great agility in where we work from. And they provide agility when it comes to ramping up to larger teams for bigger projects and, as important as that, in ramping down after the project is over.
But there is another feature that is just incredibly exciting about the Google approach to cloud computing. The Google team is constantly innovating around their cloud offerings. New features are rolled out and when they are they become instantly available to users. With each new capability my firm becomes a bit more flexible and a bit more agile and in some cases a bit better of a place to work. And since Crucial Point only exists to serve clients, when we are more agile and productive it can make direct contributions to our client’s satisfaction. So although tracking Google Apps upgrades is fun, learning them can also provide direct benefits to clients, which means they can generate real business value.
Here are some of the latest developments:
* Documents have much better import features, making it even easier to move documents to the cloud. More editing features have also been added, giving more control over images and text alignment, for example. And a new commenting feature has been added making it even easier to add, reply to, shift around comments. Real-time collaboration is now supported.
* Spreadsheets enable cells to be edited from the formula bar, enable columns to be dragged, and support much faster work online. Real time collaboration and chat are also available.
* A standalone drawing editor has been added to the tool suite as well, and it, like the other tools, supports real-time collaboration.
Read the original blog entry...
To print out a document, you rely on your local operating system, which must have a driver installed for the printer you intend to use.
Most of the time, it’s not an issue; at home, you probably have one printer and all of your PCs have the required drivers.
Things get a bit more complicated when you want to print something from a mobile device, like an iPad, or from a laptop based on Google’s Chrome OS, which relies entirely on web apps and services. This is why GoogleGoogleGoogle is working on Google Cloud Print, a service that enables “any application (web, desktop, or mobile) on any device to print to any printer.”
Google Cloud Print is still in the early days of development, but Google made the code and documentation public as part of the Chromium and Chromium OS projects. The documentation reveals how Google plans to solve some of the issues it will inevitably face, such as making Cloud Print work with legacy printers.
“The ideal experience is for your printer to have native support for connecting to cloud print services. Under this model, the printer has no need for a PC connection of any kind or for a print driver. The printer is simply registered with one or more cloud print services and awaits print jobs. Cloud-aware printers don’t exist yet, but one of our main goals in publishing this information at an early stage is to begin engaging industry leaders and the community in developing cloud-aware printers and the necessary open protocols for these printers to communicate with cloud print services.
“We want users to be able to print to legacy printers via Google Cloud Print. This is accomplished through the use of a proxy, a small piece of software that sits on a PC where the printer is installed. The proxy takes care of registering the printer with Google Cloud Print and awaiting print jobs from the service. When a job arrives, it submits the print job to the printer using the PC operating system’s native print stack and sends job status back to the printer.”
There are obviously some obstacles ahead, but it’s an amazing idea. If print jobs are handled in the cloud you won’t need drivers, and most of the problems users have with printing from devices like smartphones and tablets will be solved.
Original Article - http://mashable.com/2010/04/16/google-cloud-print/
Research and Markets has announced the addition of the "Clouded by Chrome: Googles Strategy in Cloud Computing - Chrome as Your Next OS" report to their offering.
Google is pursuing a multi-pronged strategy with the aim of redefining how consumers access online services and applications including mobile applications.
This report analyzes the dynamics of Googles disruptive moves in the world of communication services with a focus on cloud computing. Cloud computing refers to virtualized set of information services offered on-demand and dynamically in a scalable fashion over the Internet. Cloud computing offers an organization the ability to run applications, increase capacity, and add capabilities to its existing IT infrastructure without investing in new infrastructure, training new personnel, and incurring fees for licensing new software. The revenue generation model in cloud computing is primarily based on subscription and pay-per-use. Changes to IT and provisioning of resources are conducted real time in a dynamic and scalable way as a service over the Internet.
Google raises barriers to entry for potential competitors. For example, processing search queries at very high speeds has been possible with the companys billion-dollar investments in data processing centers. It is clear that Googles ambitions are big and disruptive. The company announced its biggest yet investment in data center in mid-2008, with $842 million representing its biggest capital expenditure for a single quarter. The proceeding sections of this report explore and analyze Googles move in cloud computing, online search and advertisement, and news media in more detail.
There are different views of what constitutes cloud computing. While some view cloud computing as an infrastructure others view it simply as a new business model. There are also those who view cloud computing as an evolution of existing services. In this report we look at Googles role in different segments of cloud ecosystem. As people and businesses around the world generate their consuming and business behavior through search queries, a massive global library of data is built on the Internet cloud with great value for many organizations.
According to Googles CEO, Eric Schmidt, the network is so pervasive that anything about anyone can be found out at anytime. Schmidt further emphasizes that if you dont use the cloud you will fail, adding that his companys goal is to put a cloud in the hands of a user. Googles strategy is to put its presence in as many clouds as possible. Hence the companys launch of products such as Living Stories project in the news media, promotion of Google Apps in the enterprise market and recently the launch of Google Groups, a product that is integrated with the existing Google Apps such as Google Docs, Google Calendar, Gmail, Google Sites and Google Video.
As part of its cloud strategy Google wants to use Google Groups to make the product more attractive to the enterprise sector since one of the products main features is project collaboration among employees located in diverse sites. This report also looks at Google Trends and Insights and how they are tied to Googles strategy in building an established presence on the Internet cloud. It also analyzes Googles future online strategy and demonstrates its relation to the cloud.
Had Orchestra Team started business even five years ago, there is no way that it could operate with dozens of clients managing hundreds of IT systems without significant investment in its own IT infrastructure. The vast majority of everything we do involves working with computers and the people that use our computer systems.
Would you believe that Orchestra does not even own a single server? Would you believe that we have less than $1000 in licensed software for our company? Did you know that Orchestra's employees can operate effectively from nearly any computer in the world with an internet connection?
These questions are rhetorical, but the short answer is that Orchestra has been able to leverage cloud computing to manage nearly every aspect of it's services and technology offering. Here are some of the ways we did it:
Google Apps - Connecting the Disconnected
When Orchestra began in 2008, we had a serious decision to make: do we use Google apps (then in it's infancy) to manage our documents, or do we buy Microsoft Office. Closely tied to this was the decision to use mail provided by Google rather than run our own mail servers. It came down to what we could afford. In the early days, we were looking at thousands of dollars in licensing for Microsoft applications compared to a minimal monthly fee for Google. Google Apps also provided us a level of unprecedented real-time collaboration between the team members. Being spread across three states, we needed to ensure that we could easily share documents, spreadsheets, and presentations between team members. This had the added benefit of having those tools accessible while on-site with clients. Need to look up a quotation or a spreadsheet where you were doing some math for a client? No problem, just jump on your laptop or smart phone and you were viewing what you needed to see in minutes.
Now, as this product suite has matured, it's become the de-facto standard for most of the work I do on a daily basis. I share documents with clients, prospects, and others in the business community. I collaborate freely with those in my industry and the people I'm working with. I still get questions from my clients about "how does it work?" and "why is this free?" because they also realize the power of tools that let you work together regardless of distance or time. I find it funny that I'm now frustrated whenever someone sends me an attachment in an email.
Remote Support Platforms
We use several cloud-based remote support services. First, we use Mikogo and GoToMeeting to connect to our clients. From work as simple as a quick client support call, to things as complicated as trying to hire from an applicant pool of 40 clients, these tools enable us to make decisions quickly, and share real-time information in new more interactive ways. Shared solutions like this enable a richness in communication that isn't commonly seen from professional service organizations that operate remotely, and they are a cornerstone to our business and customer satisfaction.
In addition, we use many cloud-based storage systems to manage the backups and off-site data for our clients. Programs like Jungle Disk that are associated with Rackspacke's Mosso offering, Amazon's S3 offering allow us to put our clients vital assets in the cloud. This gives them access anywhere, and a level of security and reliability that wasn't able to be offered by many firms our size.
Cloud Based Servers - Why Buy?
Most of our major applications we run virtualized in a cloud computing environment. Our Drupal development lives in an Amazon EC2 node. Our SAP Business One system resides on a Rackspace cloud server. All of these systems provide us with exceptional access and support for our key business applications. This provides us with unprecedented accessibility without having to worry about the high costs of server upkeep, maintenance, or IT costs. We have never spent a single dollar on IT support in the history of our business.
The Summary
Investment in the cloud is a great way to save your business money. Fundamentally, we run our entire IT infrastructure for less than $1,000 per month including hardware, software, and support. The best part is, as we grow, this infrastructure grows with us, and the sky is the limit.
You must have noticed that Google has been slowly inching towards a culture of Online cloud computing, and most companies, individuals and businesses have adapted to the culture of cloud computing because of its obvious advantages.
Cloud computing allows users to manage data, applications and information in a way that traditional software or hardware don’t allow and the most important advantage is that you could access your data, application and software from any computer in the world, provided you have the ID and password.
However, cloud computing itself is not without disadvantages, and the most unpleasant one is the lack of applications directly integrated into Google. Hence, users copy and paste data, use different applications time and again in order to get everything into the cloud. Google itself has admitted that it does not have the expertise to integrate the hundreds of business applications out there into the cloud.
Thus Google has now announced that Google Apps Marketplace is now open for business. Developers and software providers can now join the new Online store for integrated business applications. These cloud applications will allow Google Apps customers to discover newer applications without having to manage each one of them separately.
How Does It work ?
It works similar to the Apple App Store, but is only cheaper. Google is asking the developers and businesses a onetime fee of $100 and 20% of the revenue in exchange to the access to 25 million Google users. Apps would be authenticated using OpenID and would be secured through oAuth. The applications would be accessible through a universal Google Apps navigation system.
Google has removed what for many CIOs and IT professionals has been one of the last remaining hurdles to their adoption of Google Apps for business documents, spreadsheets, presentations and probably most importantly: email. Yesterday, the biggest of the cloud-based challengers to Microsoft and IBM-Lotus announced it now has a range of Blackberry-esque mobile device management features (including the ability to remotely wipe a smartphone) for iPhones as well as Windows Mobile and Nokia-based devices.
Cloud based email services are mature, flexible and cost effective. So why do so many small businesses try to recreate what they've been using (and paying through the nose for..) for years ?
In my last start-up, I wanted to ensure the business had a robust, flexible and cost effective email solution but did not want to invest in servers, licensing and in-house support for a Microsoft Exchange solution. As it happened, we shared an office with a Microsoft Hosted Exchange provider so the obvious route was to utilize their service which cost circa £12 ($19) per seat per month. The solution worked, was familiar to the staff and provided web based access (via Outlook Web Access) as well and calendaring and SharePoint for document management. For the first 18 months, I was happy, the staff were happy and the guys who supported the network we happy.
However, as the business grew, the cost of the solution began to outweigh the benefits and developments we were seeing from the system. The truth was (and still is I am sure) it became very costly and time consuming for the Microsoft provider to deploy new features, releases and additional services. The end game was that 18 months on, we'd still got what we had at day one. Old technology made for servers on the LAN and not suited to Cloud based deployment, development and scale.
More recently, I set about building Cloud Distribution, my new business which is focused (as you may have guessed) on Cloud Computing solutions. I took a look around the market and as expected, the same Microsoft based providers were there en-mass with little or no differentiation other than price which still came it at around £12 ($19) per seat per month. That's £180 ($288) a month for 15 mailboxes which we needed from day one. Now, in start-up land every pound counts and I simply was not prepared to splash out on old technology no matter how familiar it was to my staff so I looked around and found (not that easily I have to tell you) Google Apps Standard Edition. What an eye opener !
Up to 50 seats, 7gb mail box for every user, Web access via Gmail, Desktop access via any IMAP or POP client such as Outlook, Thunderbird etc. etc. Full group calendaring, Google Docs document management (recently extended to a full storage solution where any type of document can be uploaded and accessed), iPhone push email, calendar and contact sync and a whole host of other great small business features for NOTHING. Yes, that's right, nada, zilch, zero per seat per month. For up to 50 seats. Where's the catch ?
Believe me, from a small business perspective, there simply isn't one. Google Apps rocks. Period.
Now, I can hear the masses saying "yes but it does not do this, that and the other" but the truth is I can live without the bits it does not do, saving £180 ($288) a month for all of the other bits it does do that Microsoft's solutions will never do like deliver new features on a weekly basis, smart integration with Salesforce.com (our CRM cloud based platform) an lots of other elements which work for any business who wants to do business not support email systems.
Why am I selling Google Apps ? It's certainly not to make money for Cloud Distribution. As I said it's free and any IT savvy person who knows how to configure a domain via their ISP can get it up and running in a day max. I am outlining this proposition because it is typical of the way Cloud solutions can change the dynamics of a traditionally LAN based application or service so think about other services a small business could use Cloud IT for ?
• Clean Email (already widely used)
• Firewalling (currently at the router or behind it)
• Wi-Fi (Controller in the Cloud not on the LAN)
• VPN (Push it up to the ISP)
• Unified Threat Management (again, push it up to the ISP)
• Telephony (Hosted IP Centrex and SIP Trunking)
• Device Management
• Security Assessments
All of these can be set up to the cloud and delivered with many additional benefits at a fraction of the cost of LAN based services. So, look for the Google Apps of your next application or service requirement, save your business money, make your life easier and help you users do more with less.
Cloud Distribution are a Value Added Distributor focusing on the security, management and optimization of devices which access the Cloud. Cloud computing is a paradigm of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the "Cloud" that supports them.
Smart Phones, Laptops, Home Workers and Branch Offices all need to access critical applications efficiently and securely. Our solutions ensure that ’whilst your computing might be in the cloud, a successful implementation is very much at your feet’.
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