How the Cloud is Changing Everything for Government ITIf you want to understand the evolution of cloud computing adoption in state and local government, one place to start might be in the Alachua County Property Appraiser’s Office in Gainesville, Fla. The appraiser’s office occasionally struggled to maintain the onsite GIS it operates for itself and other local jurisdictions. We got proposals for contracting the service out, but it's very expensive.” So a few months ago, the county shifted its Esri Arc. GIS instance into the cloud with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Its first monthly bill was only $2. If we want more resources, we can just check a box.”Logan Couch, a GIS programmer analyst, said many things can be done much faster in the cloud. Now I can just jump in and do it myself.”Bob Bates, executive director of GIS, Technology and Support Services for the Alachua County Property Appraiser’s Office in Gainesville, Fla. Bates said the county is considering putting a disaster preparedness and response application in the cloud too, so that city and county executives could use their mobile devices to access it.

Steve Halliwell, senior global director of state and local government and education at Amazon Web Services, said he sees lots of customers like Alachua County that turn to the cloud to execute well on their core business functions. They're realizing they can experiment and have more agility in terms of starting on projects without waiting for hardware or a business justification based on capacity planning, he added. They're out of data center space, so what do they do? It's basically an outsourcing story, she said. The recession forced many local governments to scale back on IT costs and staffing. A few years ago, it was common for early adopters to predict that desktop computing and private data centers would disappear and be replaced by enormous public cloud infrastructures. But customers have told cloud vendors that some proprietary apps and heavily regulated data will never leave their data center, he said.

Here's an interactive map of nearly 6. You can also view a list of these companies here. At the other end of the spectrum from Alachua County’s Property Appraiser’s Office are larger, more sophisticated IT organizations developing cloud strategies that fit into their enterprise architecture planning. The promise of software as a service (Saa.

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S) rings true for Delaware CIO Jim Sills. In 2. 01. 0 when the governor’s office needed a CRM application for constituent tracking, and wanted something quickly, the state turned to Salesforce. Government and got it up and running in two months. That was one step in a much larger process.

At first, IT leaders worked with the procurement team to piggyback on another state’s contract. Most states don't have contract vehicles for all those components. It is still a challenge to procure.”In 2. Delaware started documenting Saa. S terms and conditions instead of starting from scratch with each vendor.

Now Delaware is working with several other states, a dozen cloud companies and the Center for Digital Government on a task force to develop standard cloud terminology. The task force is using Delaware’s terms and conditions template as a base for other state, city and county governments to use. It is a philosophy, not a product. I can apply cloud strategies and philosophies to my on- premises environment.”San Francisco’s IT leaders look at a matrix of public, private and hybrid clouds, as well as onsite environments. We also are re- evaluating our own data center constructs, architectures and vendors, as we establish those different environments,” explained Gami.

We have to build it and plan for it simultaneously.”Like San Francisco, Michigan’s cloud adoption has matured and evolved from experimentation to something more systematic. We have to look at the relative strength of where it makes sense to run which applications.” The DTMB regularly reviews how its computing functions align with state agency business needs in light of new cloud computing opportunities and offerings. Michigan’s Mi. Cloud initiative — a centralized cloud computing service launched several years ago — has made great progress in areas like virtual data storage and virtual server hosting. And as the DTMB has noted previously, one benefit of cloud computing is that it frees up resources. This also saves power, HVAC, UPS capacity, rack space, floor space, switch ports, SAN ports, monitoring capacity, O/S licenses, application licenses and database licenses, among others.”One promising aspect of cloud computing in the public sector is the opportunity for shared services.

It seems silly to have 5. Pund- IT’s King. Multijurisdictional efforts like these are starting to become more common. He cited as examples shared ERP implementations between Allegheny County, Pa., and Pittsburgh as well as Local Government Information Services, a long- standing organization that provides applications and IT services for 4. Minnesota cities and counties. The cloud is not a panacea, and it doesn't reduce the complexity level of things like procurement.” Government Technology has reported on the ups and downs of several of these efforts, including the Southeast Consortium for Unemployment Benefits Improvements and the Western States Contracting Alliance shared GIS data storage procurement project. San Francisco’s Gami.

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It is easier for application developers to create an Amazon instance than to set up physical hardware on- premises,” he said. An agency or group of agencies may lease a cloud space to develop something. They may keep it in the cloud, or because of agency restrictions about who can access it, they may move it back onto internal servers.

Chris Thomas, government industry manager of Esri, said his company is working on Arc. GIS for open data. We have to be careful about how we build those open data systems to make sure data is transparent and easy to get to.

The hybrid cloud may help with those conflicting priorities, so we can lock the gate but let you see through it.”Visit page 2 of our story for a list of nearly 6. Interested in cloud services?

Here's a list of nearly 6. ACCELA: A longtime provider of self- service permitting and licensing applications for the public sector, civic cloud platform veteran Accela made a conscious shift in focus to hosted services in recent years, making its products more accessible to smaller jurisdictions.

Cities like Palo Alto, Calif., and El Paso, Texas, now use Accela’s platform to develop citizen- facing apps tracking services like permits and garbage pickup. HQ: San Ramon, California AINS: A member of the Amazon Partner Network, AINS provides cloud- based infrastructure and software services.

Now authorized to operate under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (Fed. RAMP), AINS counts the Department of Housing and Urban Development and Fairfax County, Va., among its public- sector cloud clients. HQ: Gaithersburg, Maryland.

AIRWATCH: Air. Watch's Enterprise Mobility Management platform in the cloud is used by government agencies to simplify the process of deploying mobile devices. Pierce County, Wash., for example, used Air. Watch to wirelessly configure hundreds of tablets for its employees. In 2. 01. 3, the company acquired Motorola's mobility services platform, allowing it to work with ruggedized devices used by government employees who work outside of a typical office environment. HQ: Atlanta, Georgia      AKAMAI: Akamai’s cloud services are used by 1. U. S. An Internet content delivery network recognized as one of the world's largest distributed computing platforms, Akamai's worldwide servers are rented by customers who wants their websites to work faster by having content distributed from a location closer to the user accessing it. HQ: Cambridge, Massachusetts AMAZON: Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a leader in the infrastructure- as- a- service market, and has a strong presence in the public sector.

IBM - Wikipedia. IBM (International Business Machines Corporation) is an American multinationaltechnology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States, with operations in over 1. The company originated in 1. Computing- Tabulating- Recording Company (CTR) and was renamed . IBM is also a major research organization, holding the record for most patents generated by a business (as of 2.

The IBM mainframe, exemplified by the System/3. IBM has continually shifted its business mix by commoditizingmarkets focusing on higher- value, more profitable markets. This includes spinning off printer manufacturer Lexmark in 1. Think. Pad/Think. Centre) and x. 86- based server businesses to Lenovo (2.

Pw. C Consulting (2. SPSS (2. 00. 9), and The Weather Company (2.

Also in 2. 01. 4, IBM announced that it would go . Pitrat patented the computing scale in 1. They manufactured machinery for sale and lease, ranging from commercial scales and industrial time recorders, meat and cheese slicers, to tabulators and punched cards. Watson, Sr., fired from the National Cash Register Company by John Henry Patterson, called on Flint and, in 1. CTR. Government, during its first effort to maintain the employment records for 2. Social Security Act.

During the Second World War the company produced small arms for the American war effort (M1 Carbine, and Browning Automatic Rifle). In 1. 94. 9, Thomas Watson, Sr., created IBM World Trade Corporation, a subsidiary of IBM focused on foreign operations. Download Namebench For Windows 7 Free here. In 1. 95. 6, the company demonstrated the first practical example of artificial intelligence when Arthur L. Samuel of IBM's Poughkeepsie, New York, laboratory programmed an IBM 7. In 1. 95. 7, the FORTRAN scientific programming language was developed. In 1. 96. 1, IBM developed the SABRE reservation system for American Airlines and introduced the highly successful Selectric typewriter. In 1. 96. 3, IBM employees and computers helped NASA track the orbital flight of the Mercury astronauts.

A year later it moved its corporate headquarters from New York City to Armonk, New York. The latter half of the 1.

IBM continue its support of space exploration, participating in the 1. Value Of Babe Ruth Commemorative Edition Baseball Hall. Gemini flights, 1. Saturn flights and 1. On April 7, 1. 96.

IBM announced the first computer system family, the IBM System/3. It spanned the complete range of commercial and scientific applications from large to small, allowing companies for the first time to upgrade to models with greater computing capability without having to rewrite their applications. It was followed by the IBM System/3. Together the 3. 60 and 3.

IBM mainframe the dominant mainframe computer and the dominant computing platform in the industry throughout this period and into the early 1. They, and the operating systems that ran on them such as OS/VS1 and MVS, and the middleware built on top of those such as the CICS transaction processing monitor, had a near- monopoly- level hold on the computer industry and became almost synonymous with IBM products due to their marketshare. Laurer developed the Universal Product Code. In 1. 99. 1, IBM sold printer manufacturer Lexmark. In 1. 99. 3, IBM posted a US$8 billion loss - at the time the biggest in American corporate history. The result was three values: . Later in 2. 00. 9, IBM's Blue Gene supercomputing program was awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation by U.

S. President. Barack Obama. In 2. 01. 1, IBM gained worldwide attention for its artificial intelligence program Watson, which was exhibited on Jeopardy! In 2. 01. 2, IBM announced it has agreed to buy Kenexa, and a year later it also acquired Soft. Layer Technologies, a web hosting service, in a deal worth around $2 billion. In 2. 01. 6, IBM acquired video conferencing service Ustream and formed a new cloud video unit. In New York City, IBM has several offices besides CHQ, including the IBM Watson headquarters at Astor Place in Manhattan. Outside of New York, major campuses in the United States include Austin, Texas; Research Triangle Park (Raleigh- Durham), North Carolina; Rochester, Minnesota; and Silicon Valley, California.

IBM's real estate holdings are varied and globally diverse. Towers occupied by IBM include 1.

Ren. In Beijing, China, IBM occupies Pangu Plaza, which is the city's seventh tallest building and overlooks Beijing National Stadium (. Defunct IBM campuses include the IBM Somers Office Complex (Somers, New York). The company's contributions to industrial architecture and design include works by Eero Saarinen, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and I.

M. Van der Rohe's building in Chicago, the original center of the company's research division post- World War II, was recognized with the 1. Honor Award from the National Building Museum. As of 2. 01. 6, these offerings fall into the categories of cloud computing, cognitive computing, commerce, data and analytics, Internet of Things. For instance, the IBM Bluemix Paa.

S enables developers to quickly create complex websites on a pay- as- you- go model. IBM Soft. Layer is a dedicated server, managed hosting and cloud computing provider, which in 2. IBM's Kenexa suite provides employment and retention solutions, and includes the Brass. Ring, an applicant tracking system used by thousands of companies for recruiting.

Watson has since been applied to business, healthcare, developers, and universities. For example, IBM has partnered with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center to assist with considering treatment options for oncology patients and for doing melanoma screenings. Now, IBM Research constitutes the largest industrial research organization in the world, with 1. Watson Research Center in New York, and facilities include the Almaden lab in California, Austin lab in Texas, Australia lab in Melbourne, Brazil lab in S. In 2. 01. 2, that expenditure was approximately $6. USD. IBM's open source involvement has not been trouble- free, however (see SCO v.

IBM). Famous inventions and developments by IBM include: the Automated teller machine (ATM), Dynamic random access memory (DRAM), the electronic keypunch, the financial swap, the floppy disk, the hard disk drive, the magnetic stripe card, the relational database, RISC, the SABRE airline reservation system, SQL, the Universal Product Code (UPC) bar code, and the virtual machine. Additionally, in 1. Since its first patent for a traffic signaling device, IBM has been one of the world's most prolific patent sources. In 2. 01. 7, the company holds the record for most patents generated by a business, marking 2. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N. Y., in 1. 97. 3, for work in semiconductors; Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer, of the Zurich Research Center, in 1.

Several IBMers have also won the Turing Award, including the first female recipient Frances E. Since 1. 99. 6, IBM has been the exclusive technology partner for the Masters Tournament, one of the four major championships in professional golf, with IBM creating the first Masters.

Phone app with live streaming (2. K Ultra High Definition feed in the United States for a major sporting event (2. Open, Wimbledon, the Australian Open, and the French Open. The company was among the first corporations to provide group life insurance (1.

IBM hired its first black salesperson in 1. CEO Thomas J. Supreme Court decision in Brown vs.

Board of Education and 1. Civil Rights Act of 1. The Human Rights Campaign has rated IBM 1. Additionally, in 2. IBM became the first major company in the world to commit formally to not use genetic information in employment decisions; and in 2.

IBM was named to Working Mother's 1. Best Companies List for the 3. For early- career high potential employees, IBM sponsors leadership development programs by discipline (e. GMLDP), human resources (HRLDP), finance (FLDP)).

Each year, the company also selects 5. IBMers for the IBM Corporate Service Corps (CSC). The company's most prestigious designation is that of IBM Fellow.

Since 1. 96. 3, the company names a handful of Fellows each year based on technical achievement.