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Education, Policy

Tight govt IT budgets boost cloud appeal: Google

By Robin Hicks | 15 June 2009

A senior Google executive has said that tight public sector information technology (IT) budgets are provoking interest in cloud computing, but adoption of the media giant’s services in Asia has so far been limited to the education sector.

Deepak Ramanathan, Head of Marketing for Google Enterprise, Asia Pacific, told FutureGov that smaller government agencies have been showing interest in its cloud services such Google Apps and Gmail, and Google has been involved in several government IT tenders.

“Budgets are being cut in some agencies, so the number of discussions we’re having with governments is increasing. The private sector argument for cloud computing is moving into the public sector,” said Ramanathan.

However, according to IDC, government IT budgets in Asia Pacific - excluding Japan - will grow by 6.8 per cent this year, without taking into account economic stimulus packages, many of which involve increased IT spend.

The number of public sector customers using Google cloud services remains small in Asia. The Department of Education in the Australian state of New South Wales is among the first customers to date; 1.5 million students in the state have adopted Gmail.

“When you think about the education space and the younger generation, many are already using Gmail,” said Ramanathan. “It makes sense that universities and schools are bringing existing user habits into the education environment.”

Ramanthan said that 3000 businesses are signing up to use Google Apps every day, and the product has only been on the market for 22 months. Among the most popular applications is Google’s geospatial technology which is being used within the firewall. Also popular has been its search, security and archiving tools.

“The biggest challenge is to work out how to change internal processes so that technology can be adopted more quickly,” said Ramanathan. “Google’s grand mission is to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful for all. But that’s very difficult to do when more than half of it is sitting behind a firewall.”

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