For what it's worth, this was how Microsoft used to compete back in the day. They would go in to a big orgs like this that used to have Novell or Lotus contracts worth tens of millions and offer up prices per seat that were ridiculously cheap.
why $9.5mil - isn't it free for educational institution?
anyway, if google focuses only on schools and universities then half the battle is won against MS as millions and millions of student will have their primary email from gmail and when they join the workforce they will automatically become a marketing tool for google to implement similar products in the companies.
You'd think though, that google would work with them for less than the amount they are spending to setup those domains. Assuming gmail is a money maker, google would love to have that many more guaranteed users.
Email is a solved problem, and it's mysterious to me why a school system wouldn't just throw up a few servers and be done with it. Google can now data mine millions of students for marketing purposes, and charge them for the benefit. I don't get it.
Amen to that. Setting up mail infrastructures for a number of users with far fewer zeros is pain enough, I can't imagine 1.5mil
And the AU was probably smart enough to do the research and find out that it would cost a whole lot more to purchase, build out, and maintain their own mail infrastructure.
And the AU was probably smart enough to do the research and find out that it would cost a whole lot more to purchase, build out, and maintain their own mail infrastructure.
I've spent enough time in the hands of the NSW Department of Education to be able to tell you that any time they make the correct decision it's purely by accident.
Why should the school system be in the business of running their own email servers? They don't generate their own power or purify their own water. The NSW Department of Education is probably not particularly skilled at running large IT infrastructure projects in-house -- nor should they be.
Because they're not techies and don't trust themselves to 'throw up a few servers' reliably? I dunno, that's my guess, since it seems they were looking for an email contract both with Outlook and now with Gmail.
And I expect that many students will find Gmail more convenient. The simplicity of the interface, the fast loading time, and the ability to search your inbox instantly for attachments or contacts are all winners for Gmail.
I don't really buy that. I know several great programmers who are now great sysadmins, or vice versa.
Now, sysadmin may be a bit of a misnomer - sometimes sysadmins are given fancy titles such as 'network engineer', 'network architect', 'IT Manager', etc. They're all basically sysadmins.
Good sysadmins do more than just image laptops. They are familiar with the software's architecture, so they can help scale it up to whatever proportions are needed. They almost certaintly are proficient perl/bash/python programmers as well.
Education is not going to pay for top-class engineering talent. They pretty much have to go for the lowest common denominator (Exchange, MCSE's are ten a penny) or outsource altogether.
In my experience, there are several kinds of sysadmins.
Many of them are little more than low-skilled button pressers, password resetters, and service restarters (although they may have lots of domain-specific knowledge learned by rote and not understood).
The good ones, however, are more than competent programmers in their own right, can make quick and accurate diagnoses of tough problems and fix them, write their own tools, etc.
Also, there is mention that Google might host some of the e-mail in Australia itself (I have the feeling the local govt would push for this.)