Office 365 reaches for the sky with 80,000 seat FAA win Troubled IT contractor Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) has won a $91m contract to provide 80,000 employees in the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and US Department of Transportation (DOT) with Office 365. The contract is for one base year's operation for 60,000 FAA staff and 20,000 at the DOT, with an option for six …
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Even if the price is for the full 7 years, it's $13.50/user/month. This seems quite high, and after seeing all of the problems that the University of Arizona had with BPOS, and the inability of Microsoft to even come up with a way of migrating from BPOS to Office 365, I can't see this as a good thing.
Looks like DOI finally did something right, both in refusing to move from Lotus Notes to Exchange, and then when they finally did move off of Notes they are moving to Google Apps for Government.
So you aren't on it yet then. We are and the platform sucks. Exchange has a far better calendar system. Basic mail services are okay, but it can't do any of the complicated stuff older non-Google systems could do like dynamically determined mail groups. And Google's insistence that labels are better than folders so you'll use them because we said so system only confuses the hell out of people who think in terms of file folders. And Mail and Calendar are the good parts compared to the rest of the apps.
Hah 'Redmond's facing the prospect of a resurgent open source office-applications' yeah, right. There are a few cash strapped Europeans who cannot afford the price of decent software, but they will soon be back in the Microsoft fold when they have some money again. They always come back. Always.
My math shows that it works out to about $14 per month per user. Not far from what other bids for other big things. CSC also was the prime bidding Google Apps in Los Angeles, that initially seemed to run to $2-$10 per seat per month. Can't imagine that CSC in their FAA bid hadn't learned something from the LA security difficulties. The monthly cost per seat is therefore less than 1% of the direct labor cost.
Actually, I'm rather scared that the FAA's documents and data will be in MS's cloud. Security has not been one of their hallmarks. No policy and no amount of training will keep employees from dishing info. I can understand the cloud for smaller businesses, but I would think that for anyone who needs to maintain the least bit of privacy, that security would outweigh the need to save a few bucks. I also want to know how they are going to get their information back if they decide that the public cloud is too expensive, too insecure, etc.
Stuck between an unstoppable force (users) and an immovable object (MSO). You can polish a turd, but it's still a turd and putting CSC's name on it will not change what the MSO (Office365, BPOS, whatever they're calling it this week) solution is.
I know from experience unfortunately.
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