GSA has a deal in place with partners Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Unisys (NYSE: UIS) to migrate 17, 000 employees and contractors to Google Apps for Government, which will provide cloud-based programs like Gmail and Google Calendar to the agency.
The decision follows a competitive request for proposal process to examine replacement options for the current GSA email system.
Unisys was selected by GSA to migrate employees to the new system.
“By making this switch, GSA will benefit in a number of ways, ” Director of Google Federal Services Mike Bradshaw wrote on the Google blog. “Modern email and collaboration tools will help make employees more efficient and effective. Google Apps will bring GSA a continual stream of new and innovative features, helping the agency keep pace with advances in technology in the years ahead. And taxpayers will benefit too—by reducing the burden of in-house maintenance and eliminating the need to replace hardware to host its email systems, GSA expects to lower costs by 50 percent over the next five years.”
Unisys will also support training and cloud-based software under the five-year deal.
“We applaud GSA for boldly embracing the benefits of cloud computing to improve communications and collaboration across their diverse organization, ” said Ted Davies, president of Unisys Federal Systems. “We are excited to partner with our longstanding GSA customer to more effectively deliver their mission supporting other agencies and the U.S. citizens at a lower cost to the taxpayer.”
Unisys also took the chance to applaud the GSA in taking a leading role in bringing cloud technologies into the government.
“We are glad to be involved in the federal government’s burgeoning effort to move toward cloud computing as a way to make employees more efficient, protect government data and save taxpayer dollars, ” said Venkatapathi “PV” Puvvada, vice president and managing partner for civilian agencies at Unisys Federal Systems. “GSA’s contract award to Unisys illustrates that the government views cloud computing solutions as appropriate for mission-critical tasks like email and collaboration, and we congratulate GSA for its leadership as the government continues to adopt these solutions. We hope to work with other agencies as they follow GSA’s lead.”
