Infotech Lead America: The County of Santa Clara has selected Microsoft Office 365 to consolidate IT assets, providing cost savings to the county and more than 36 new products.
The cost for this expansion was just under 10 percent more than previously spent.
The countywide Enterprise Software License Agreement provides the county with significant benefits including: better visibility into its IT assets; improved mission performance through productivity, unified communications and collaboration tools; better governance and control over IT spending and the ability to leverage buying power as a large organization.
“We selected Office 365 because it addressed a wide spectrum of county needs. The selection of this solution and our IT consolidation efforts have enabled us to nearly double the number of employees covered and will provide our staff with new tools and collaboration technologies to help better serve our residents,” said Joyce Wing, chief information officer.
The new approach will increase the mobility of workers by providing access virtually anywhere, any time and with any device and will provide the ability to share documents across the organization electronically. The cost to the county will be $3.6 million annually for the entire workforce. Before this agreement, only half the county staff was covered, at a cost of $3.3 million.
“The County of Santa Clara has a long track record as a progressive leader in utilizing new technologies to improve the resident services it provides,” said Stuart McKee, chief technology officer for U.S. State and Local Government at Microsoft Corp.
One of the benefits of Office 365 is the ability to provide a hybrid system that accommodates most county application and security requirements to interact with cloud solutions while providing a local option for highly sensitive communications using advanced security protections.
