Google has signed on the New Zealand Postal Service as its largest user to date of Google Apps. NZ will be yanking out Microsoft Office and rolling out Google Apps to 2,100 employees in a deal that will save the country $2 million in hardware costs over three years, it said.
Earlier in the month, NZ entered into what it thought was a routine renegotiation with Microsoft to renew software. Those talks left the agency handling the talks to recommend that individual states dump Microsoft and find alternatives, reports NZ's National Business Review.
The NZ postal service took that recommendation to heart and began evaluating alternatives, including Azure and Office 2010, the NBR reports. But Google won out.
Google expects this New Zealand deal to be a proving point that its service is secure, available and ready for enterprise use.
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