Taken from the Australian IT website
GOOGLE has edged out some of the biggest brands in the
enterprise IT services market to pick up another major contract win in
Australia's education sector.
Google partner SMS Management and Technology has emerged as the leading
bidder to supply the NSW Department of Education with 1.5 million
student email services using a customised version of the search giant's
Gmail service, Acting NSW Minister for Education and Training John
Hatzistergos said.
"This commitment is a further demonstration of the NSW Labor
Government's commitment to equip teachers and students with the best
possible means to compete successfully in the constantly evolving world
of information technology," he said.
NSW education department chief information officer Stephen Wilson
said the department was yet to finalise its contract with SMS but
confirmed that it had lodged the winning bid.
SMS will be the prime contractor alongside Google and Telstra to fulfil the contract, valued at $9.5 million over three years.
The department rejected bids from Hewlett-Packard, Telstra
subsidiary Kaz, and incumbent provider Unisys, to award the contract to
SMS.
It's understood that the contract will be one the largest private deployments of Gmail in the world.
The win is Google's second major victory in the academic sector
after Macquarie University signed up for Gmail in September last year.
It could have massive implications for the Australian software market,
as it places Gmail's online word processing software, Google Docs, in a
strong position to challenge Microsoft's Office software suite in the
education sector.
Mr Wilson said the agency had no plans to switch on Google's online word processing software at this stage.
"We haven't made any decision there. This contract was just email," Mr Wilson said.
SMS chief executive Tom Stianos said the trend towards providing software as a service was "unstoppable".
However, the Gmail deployment at Macquarie University hasn't been without controversy.
Gmail is hosted offshore and the university chose not to extend the
service to staff due to concerns that it would generate excessive
bandwidth bills retrieving messages.
The education department's Gmail roll-out will increase current
email storage allocated to students by a multiple of 170 times from
35MB to 6GB.
The department is also deploying extra security filtering, which will be carried out locally.
"You have to remember we're the largest consumer of internet traffic in NSW by a long way.
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