May 19
2009
Industry Views – City of LA/Google, Cloud Computing, and Dreamforce
My first two weeks here at BasicGov has been full of activity.
The first week was marked by an event that proves the cloud computing model is gaining significant traction in government. The decision by the City of Los Angeles to move from enterprise software (Novell) to Google’s Software as a Service (SaaS) for email and calendaring was a major departure from the, I’ll say it, older way of thinking and deploying software. The discussions about whether this is a good or bad move has been lighting up the internet and is very interesting, but at the end of the day, should the software customer be responsible for maintaining upgrades and best practices implementation anymore.
All in all, this is very exciting for companies like us as it shows other cities that a) change is good, and b) change can happen (as a sidebar, there are documents circulating that do a detailed cost analysis of this decision, if you would like that, please let me know). This is a major event in the evolution of cloud computing and many of my peers are very excited about how this event will influence government software decision making in 2010.
In addition to that, BasicGov is releasing a new product this week and there is an impressive set of products announcements ahead of us. Please sign up for any or all of ways to communicate with you (twitter, blog, newsletter, etc)
We are also preparing for DreamForce, which is an education and partnering event for companies delivering products based on Salesforce.com’s Force.com platform. If anyone is out there on the Force.com platform and sells to local government, I would like to meet you there.
Mike
