Open Landmark

17 July 2008

CIO News View: Telegraph CIO on swapping Google in for Microsoft

Martin Veitch

The Telegraph Media Group’s move to Google Apps could be a landmark

. . .

In an exclusive interview with CIO magazine, TMG CIO Paul Cheesbrough told us why. Here are the highlights:

“We’ve got Office 2003, Windows XP and Exchange 2003 and we started to look at the refresh cycle at the beginning of this year. We had a decision to make as to whether to sign up for a three-year enterprise agreement with Microsoft or look at something else. [As a pilot] we put 10 per cent of our 1400 user seat estate and allowed them to use Google Apps alongside their Office and Exchange infrastructure. Overwhelmingly, the feedback was positive and there would have been uproar if we had said we were turning it off. We were faced with the decision of whether we pursued the same [Microsoft] path and paid the price for that or put more and more internal solutions in the cloud.

“We made a conscious decision not to refresh any of [the Microsoft infrastructure]. We’re not going to remove it but we won’t upgrade it. Some users might use Outlook as the client but we’re moving to migrate people from Outlook onto Google by the end of the year. We’re not going to rip and replace but we’ve decided not to refresh Office 2003 and we’ll sweat that asset. Google Apps is good enough and rich enough for us to do what we need to do. Collaboration has been very powerful [in Google Apps] and as people use Google Mail and Calendar they’ll naturally stray to use Google Docs.

BRAVO!

Observation: Once the PC=Microsoft paradigm is broken I foresee a very short delay before shifting to an open source desktop alternative. (Hint: Firefox runs just as well, if not better, in Linux!)

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