- Log in to post comments
Governments around the world are increasingly taking up Cloud services.
Some Cloud services have proven to be highly cost-effective and secure.
Governments also have a requirement to support their own economies - and that means supporting the nation's Clouds.
A good example of this was the Department of Interior taking on Google services.
They had to be taken to court first when Google demanded an injunction between the Department and Microsoft delivering their email/communication services. After it was found the tender offer could not require all providers to meet Microsoft requirements to join the tender, it was open game - and Google subsequently won a $35 million contract to provide a hybrid private cloud to the department. Refer to this link for more information: http://www.realpolitika.org/?rp=c6SeopWjpahwq5qap3VlamKWk2eVbF5rZmpiYmVpZGZdm5WbZGJlm5Fml2mTbJZqZZZxnpQ%3D
Government goes deep. There are many agencies within each department - some with hundreds or thousands of staff with budgets of millions or billions of dollars. Each Agency actually must operate like an office of a small business - they have exactly the same needs - office space, stationary, network connectivity, thin clients, email/document services, etc. The Agencies are the end-points of any Government - that will connect with local or state businesses to have their needs fulfilled. Of course, you can branch out even further to local governments, with their departments and agencies - who are even closer to the ground and further engrained in the local community.
The parallel that arises is that Government has similar needs as business - from the SMB all the way up to the very large multi-national corporation. It is easy to imagine this with the following flow:
US Government = Federal & State Governments & International Embassies/Offices
Federal Government = Departments + Departments' Agencies
State Governments = Local Governments/Councils
Local Governments = Departments + Departments' Agencies
International Embassies = Departments + Departments' Agencies
Coca Cola Holdings = HQ (US) & International Subsidiaries
Coca Cola US = HQ Office & State Operations/Offices
Coca Cola HQ Office = Departments + Departments' Agencies
Coca Cola State Operations/Offices = Departments + Departments' Agencies
Coca Cola International Subsidiaries = Departments + Departments' Agencies
From a global stand-point, they look pretty similar - and they have similar needs.
From a Government stand-point, they touch Coca Cola at every level in terms of taxation, licensing, etc.
From a Coca Cola stand-point, they pay the various taxes at each level plus they also make millions of dollers in revenue as they pump millions of litres of drinks and other products into the Government ecosystem - from the end-point office workers in the Agencies throughout the whole government.
There are tens of thousands of vending machines in government buildings all around the world providing drinks to government workers.
The Government and Enterprise both require HR, Accounting, Facility Management, IT Management, etc.
From a Provider stand-point, providing Cloud services will need to take the symbiotic ecosystem into account and prepare for it to be competitive in the future. This will be like taking the supply chain management and inter-operability to the next level and having Government PaaS or SaaS synchronising real-time with SMB and Enterprise PaaS and SaaS.
Building solutions and services that meet the stringent security requirements of the toughest Government will only add value to SMB and Enterprise offerings and enable the Provider to close the gap between the two disparate systems and technical ecosystems, thereby bringing them closer to becoming the symbiotic ecosystem that they in fact already are - in the economically functional sense.