Arizona State goes from spending 500k/year to zero. Google's threat to Microsoft Exchange is so potent, that it's not even funny. Check out this story:
When Adrian Sannier became the university technology officer at Arizona State University in the fall of 2005, he was handed a simple yet monumental brief by ASU president Michael Crow: make IT the primary driver in Crow's ambitious "New American University" project. The goal is to raise ASU's academic standing while increasing the number of resident students from around 65,000 to 90,000 by the end of this decade.
The first step in the school's new IT strategy was an alliance with Google's Enterprise Solutions division. Last October, ASU became the first large institution to deploy Google Apps, a comprehensive suite of productivity applications that includes e-mail, search, calendars, instant messaging, and even word processing and spreadsheets.
Initially offering new e-mail accounts based on Google's Gmail service (but retaining the "asu.edu" domain) on an opt-in basis, Sannier and his team found that students were making the switch at the rate of around 300 per hour. Today, more than 40,000 ASU students and faculty have made the switch, and he expects to shut down the University's in-house mail servers near the end of this term.
Since the e-mail switch-over, Sannier has been rolling out additional applications including calendar (which users can now share online, a capability the old university system didn't have), IM, and search. Within the next two months he expects to offer personalized home pages as well as online word-processing documents and spreadsheets based on Google Apps.
The cost to ASU: zero.
Ray Ozzie better get busy integrating his Groove stuff into the next gen Microsoft collab-platform. Oh wait, it's done. Who knew? Who'll pay?
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