Feb 07
2009
Government Going SaaS – Serving the Public in Difficult Economic Times
I hope Google Trademark lawyers don’t come after me. I took that title from a recent webinar hosted on a TechRepublic Webcast and modified it a bit. The presentation was done by James Ferreira, CIO for the office of the New Mexico Attorney General.
In the presentation (email me and I’ll send you a link to download it from TechRepublic) James compares the cost, features, and benefits of two systems and the decision making rationale for selecting one over another. In one corner, you have the heavyweight champion(Microsoft) , enterprise based, installed software with huge marketshare. In the other corner, the leading contender, definitely in the heavyweight category for speed and power, but with the added benefit of lightweight costs and overhead due to a software as a service (SaaS) delivery model.
Guess who won?
I wrote an earlier post about LA moving over to Google from Novell Groupwise products, and this youtube video talks about another company that moved 12,000 employees from Microsoft to Google. Clearly SaaS is not longer just a trend.
A summary of the factors at which Google did better is below:
- Scalability
- Storage Capability
- Data Searchability
- Data Security
- Total Cost of Ownership
- Data Management
- Connectivity
All this leads to a model where the customer was able to reduce costs while increasing functionality.
I’m not saying BasicGov is Google, but those 7 items above are reasons to choose us over other providers of software for local government. Our software is hosted on Force.com and Amazon.com and these two cloud computing platforms are in the same league as Google, if not better.
The added bonus long term for BasicGov is that a very high percentage of our tech effort is on feature development.
