A Huge Win for Google

There are some great and very telling quotes from city officials in this Los Angeles Times blog post on the city's decision to shift to Google Apps for email for 30,000 employees.

Councilman Tony Cardenas: "The City of Los Angeles, the second-largest city in the nation, made a world-class decision today to support a state-of-the art email system."

Councilman Paul Koretz: "It's unclear if this is cutting edge or the edge of a cliff and we're about to step off."

The vote yesterday overcame the council's initial concerns about the Google system's reliability and security and marked a milestone in the search giant's expansion into productivity applications. It also marked a victory for Google over competing vendors Novell and Microsoft.

Ironically, as noted by Computerworld, about $1.5 million of the more than $7 million in funds needed to make the transition will come from a Microsoft antitrust settlement in which the city took part.

See this earlier post for more background on the process and the questions that council members asked the city's technology staff prior to signing off on the Google deal.