City of Boston drops Microsoft Exchange for Gmail
It's another win for Google -- Boston city employees make the switch to some of the search giant's business services.
As Google gears up for its big week in the spotlight, it's making another notch in its business software belt. The city of Boston has decided to switch the e-mail provider of its 20,000 employees from Microsoft to Google, The Boston Globe reported Friday.
In addition to using Gmail instead of Microsoft Exchange, Boston will also swap in Google Docs for word processing and Google's cloud service for storing documents. The city will pay Google about $800,000 for the move but will save around $280,000 a year for dropping the Microsoft products.
Google told the Globe that about 5 million businesses use its cloud applications, including the U.S. Department of the Interior, the state of Colorado, and Princeton University.
It's another big win for Google as the company and rival Microsoft continue to battle over the enterprise solutions space. Microsoft has been known to throw quite a few barbs Google's way in the form of aggressive ad campaigns criticizing Google's products, including search and Gmail. One ad that debuted Friday characterized Google Docs as a gamble on security.
Microsoft should get its jabs in while it still can, especially since Google will dominate the media's attention during its Google I/O developers conference next week.