City of Orlando, Florida

Project: E-mail

To address recent budget and human resource challenges, the City of Orlando moved its e-mail and productivity solution to the cloud. Preparing for the Fiscal Year 2010, the City faced a 12 percent budget cut and the retirement of two mail administrators and an information security officer. As the license renewal deadline approached, the City’s CIO confronted these business challenges by leading Orlando into the cloud.

After evaluating several providers, Orlando chose to contract with Google to provide an e-mail solution for all 3,000 City workers. City leadership supported the transition based on several decision factors including projected cost savings of $262,500 per year, centralized document storage and collaboration, increased mail storage from 100MB to 25GB per user, and enhanced support for mobile devices.

Although the City’s contract includes Google Docs, the City also retained the Microsoft Office productivity suite in order to avoid the cost to retrain employees.

After piloting with a small number of users, the full roll-out of the solution occurred on January 7, 2010. The City has realized a 65 percent reduction in e-mail costs and provided additional features to increase the productivity of workers. Google is now responsible for the City’s e-mail server maintenance and IT support. Security functions and features such as virus checking and spam control are also performed by Google through their Postini services.