Cloud Trends Panel with Google, IBM, Microsoft and Verizon

By Jim Lundy

At the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s 16th annual Intergovernmental Technology Conference (ITC), I moderated the opening panel on Trends  in Government Cloud Computing. It featured the biggest names in Cloud and a few others. The panelists were mainly regional executives from Google, IBM, Microsoft and Verizon from the Mid-Atlantic area. It was great exposure for Aragon Research and we covered a lot of ground in the 60 minutes we were on stage.

Cloud -Still Early days in Government

Each of the panelists talked about some of the trends they see occurring. David Mihalchik from Google discussed the launch of Google’s Government Cloud and the accounts that they have been winning new clients, most of it focused on Collaboration Apps. Despite all this, from the reaction, I got the feeling that the audience is still getting to know and get comfortable with migrating apps to the Cloud.

Cloud – IBM, Microsoft, Google and Verizon talk Trends

IBM‘s Brennan Preine gave a captivating discussion of the potential of Cloud and gave examples of some State and Local deployments that are associated with their Smarter Cities initiative.

Microsoft‘s Lamont Harrington and Steve Read discussed their portfolio of SaaS, Paas (Azure) and IaaS (server apps) solutions. They also shared some solid examples of how they have helped state and local governments migrate legacy applications to the Cloud.

Finally, Jeff Deacon of Terremark, a Verizon Company, discussed Verizon’s efforts in promoting standards for Cloud Computing.

The thing I liked the most about the panel is that for the most part, the panelists kept it focused on the trends they see in Government Cloud and shared stories and examples of what they have done. We did get some good questions from the audience and focused on what the costs and/or savings are from moving to the Cloud. Google claimed that they have documented examples of States saving 50% or more when migrating applications, such as email, to the cloud.

Based on some of the other discussions going on at ITC, it is clear that there is a lot of interest in Cloud Computing within State Government, but it is still early days. My top tweet during some of the sessions that I observed, was: Lots of PaaS vendors talk about savings, until you get the bill.