OC CIO Minutes November 8, 2012

Southern California/Orange County CIO Breakfast Round Table

November 8, 2012 meeting

 

Present:        Joe Desuta, Sean Brown, Jim Sutter, Jeff Reid, Keith Golden, Jeff Hecht, Dave Phillips

 

The following is a list of topics and speakers through January:

 

12/13/12       Branding and Marketing IT                      Joel Manfredo

1/10/13         Controlling Project Costs                        Jon Grunzweig

 

Topic:          Google Apps - Revisited

 

We thanked Joe for giving us an update on Google Apps, which he presented 12 months ago, and a progress report on his implementation projects.  To remind you, Google Apps is Cloud based email (Gmail), productivity tools and collaboration software. At this time, Gmail has about 1% of the total market share of email, but 50% of the cloud-based email. Slides 4 and 5 list the various tools, reliability SLA and costs.  Now the battle is between Gmail vs Office 365. Over 4M businesses have gone Google (see slides 9, 10 and 11). 

Joe then gave us an update on his implementation projects.  First Team is a full service real estate co., founded in 1976, #1 independent in OC, 40 locations, 2,000 employees and agents.  They had a good business case for going Google – email reliability, cost justification by forgoing upgrades, leverage Google Apps for productivity gains and competitive advantage.  Migration is in progress with about 1500 users migrated so far. Switching emails is transformational – many users already familiar with Gmail, which is much better than OWA.  Google Apps enables collaboration on several levels.  Migration is harder than it should have been.  Reliability and security have been achieved.  Lesson learned - don’t skip on training.  All In all, Google has been the right bet for First Team.  It should merit consideration for a cloud-based solution.  We recommend that you read Joe’s slides for more detail. They are posted at:  http://www.slideshare.net/occio