Los Angeles OKs Plan to Use Google Web Services

City Council members tentatively approved a multimillion-dollar proposal Tuesday to tap Google Inc. for government e-mail and other Internet services, a boon for the Web giant as it seeks to wrest market share for office software from rival Microsoft Corp.

The Council voted unanimously for the $7.2 million deal with contractor Computer Sciences Corp. to replace many city computer systems with the so-called Google Apps services.

An amendment added shortly before the vote makes the contract contingent on Computer Science agreeing to pay a preset penalty if a security breach occurs. The contractor's project manager David Barber said he believed such an agreement would be reached.

The city's police officers' union and privacy advocates had raised security concerns over the Google contract because it places data online rather than on individual computers under the city's direct control.

Under the deal, Google will provide e-mail, calendar, online chatting and other services to 30,000 city employees.

The Council chose Google's offer over competing bids from Microsoft and more than a dozen other technology firms eager to score the nation's second second-largest city as a client.

The move will also end the city's 7-year contract to use Novell Inc.'s GroupWise e-mail and record-keeping software, which city workers have complained is slow and crash-prone.

Novell senior vice president said during the Council hearing that many city departments were not using the most recent version of GroupWise and reiterated an offer to provide additional services for free.

"The titans are fighting, and they all want our attention," said Councilman Tony Cardenas, who sponsored the legislation granting the contract to Google.

The vote came amid a push by Mountain View-based Google to market its "cloud computing" services — applications that run remotely on the company's own servers instead of users' desktop machines — to governments and large security-conscious corporations.