Life in the Bush

admin June 04, 2008 vision 4 Comments

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The summit was pretty good today. A CIO at a large state university gave a presentation on outsourcing “non-distinctive” services such as email. He compared the CIOs/CTOs who are futzing with their email systems and meager 100 mb quotas to Zulu tribesman clutching their spears watching a rocket zip by overhead. He’s outsourced everything to Google. He got out a thumbdrive and started jumping on it to make the point that storage is really cheap, even though it’s expensive for us to administer on our pathetic scale… Someone asked, “but aren’t you afraid that next year Google’s going to ask you to pay?” and he started laughing–“No,” he said, “because our needs are so minute compared to what they’re doing. What we would pay wouldn’t even register on their spreadsheets…”

Also, his presentation consisted of a bunch of powerpoint slides that were photos of napkins with drawings. Nice touch.

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4 Responses to “Life in the Bush”

  1. skvidal said:

    Jun 06, 08 at 5:19 am

    I think I’d be concerned more with if next year google decided to be evil.

  2. cec said:

    Jun 06, 08 at 7:33 am

    I wouldn’t be worried about google deciding to be evil, but I would worry about google’s incentive to keep data private in the event of a lawsuit or request by the government. That may be because I haven’t read the contract. But even then, I think you’ve got more options if you control your own data.

    I do agree that email is not terribly sexy and is a commodity service, but that suggests to me that an IT department’s time would be better spent overseeing/managing an out-of-the-box product (could still be open-source) than building a custom email solution.

  3. admin said:

    Jun 06, 08 at 4:42 pm

    Privacy and evil are concerns. Also, I’m concerned about university access if in an e-discovery (shudder) situation. Also, for people addicted to their Outlook environment, they would lose an integrated scheduling tool that’s also easily available on their pda. But I bet Google will solve the latter problem soon enough and contracts might deal with the access/privacy issue, and then we just need to worry about evil. Which I don’t think is compelling… we will see.

  4. jaeger said:

    Jun 11, 08 at 8:17 pm

    What about a middle ground (sort of) like zimbra?
    In house and under control, but “turnkey” in the sense thats its not completely in house. Plus its supposed to have good Outlook compatibility.

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