Google Wins High Profile Client In Business Service Fight With Microsoft
Posted by Neil Payne on October 30th, 2009Google has won its highest-profile customer in its battle with Microsoft to provide e-mail and other internet services to businesses.
Los Angeles City Council has approved a multimillion-dollar proposal to use Google’s range of office products for its 30,000 workers.
The deal could be a landmark for the search giant as it seeks to wrest market share for office software from Microsoft and IBM. It introduced Google Apps, which includes e-mail, word processing and spreadsheet tools, three years ago.
Google Apps
The technology is positioned as a rival to Microsoft’s dominant Office suite of software, which helped to deliver $2.9 billion (£1.8 billion) in revenue for the company’s business division in the last quarter.
The city council voted unanimously for the $7.2 million deal to replace many of its computer systems with the Google Apps services, choosing this offer over competing bids from Microsoft and more than a dozen other technology firms eager to win America’s second-largest city as a client.
The vote came amid a push by Google to market its “cloud computing” Apps services — applications that run remotely on the company’s own servers, instead of users’ desktop machines — to governments and large, security-conscious corporations.
Read More>Times Online
Entries (RSS)