Cloud Computing Services: O'Reilly chat w/ Google and City of LA. #g2e #cloud #gov2

Randy Levin (City of LA), Dave Girourd (Google), O'Reilly

• Going to cloud, saving $500M
• Novell currently for email.
• End of RFP process what would need is going to google and leapfrog
• Google - biggest cloud objectives

• who owns data
• how is it managed
• data distributed over massive computing infrastructure

Google: not trying to lock people in

O'R: do you feel locked in?  

L: No more than SAP.  More free that way.

O'R: What are some of the new parts of the Google toolset?  e.g., Automatic translation (that have no obvious financial need)

G: When Google got into multilingual and taken things that are fanciful science project that are approachable (e.g., google earth).  Thinking about speech recognition, translation - really only work on massive scale.  Devices too: Chrome OS and Android will adapt to data stored in cloud and these things access the data.  

O'R: Polyglot LA...issue of languages increasingly difficult to give services to all citizens.

L: Need to figure out how to embrace this.  Really we're only on email and calendaring.  Current email wouldn't work w/ Android, iPhone.  Don't want to worry about having standard device.  Can let workforce use whatever they like.

O'R: One piece of advice to agency looking to cloud compute

L: Know your requirements.  We thought we did, but didn't.  Elongated process.

G: Large org need to think of it as transformational change.  Means to end.  Signify that change is afoot.  Need high-level push that times are changing and cloud is one way to do that.

Posted via email from John Whalen's Posterous