ASU turns to Google

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As an alumni of the University of Arizona, it is always good to see any of the Arizona schools try something new and innovative. This time, it was our arch-rivals atArizona State University (in Tempe, AZ, near Phoenix).

An article in InformationWeek reports that40,000 ASU Students Leap to Google Apps; University Pays Zero. The ASU president, Michael Crow, wants to make IT the primary driver in his ambitious "New American University" project.Last October, ASU became the first large institution to deploy Google Apps, a comprehensive suite of productivity applications that includes e-mail, search, calendars, instant messaging, and even word processing and spreadsheets.I've tried them out, they work, nothing fancy but certainly good enough for college homework assignments.

Already 40,000 students and faculty have switched their e-mail to Google, while keeping their asu.edu designation. (out of 65,000 student population, which Mr. Crow is trying to raise to 90,000 students!)

E-mail is a thorn in the side of storage administrators. Being "semi-structured" repositories, they cannot just delete or move files around, as there is context between notes and their attachments, that shouldn't be broken. E-mail systems are often the fastest growing consumer of storage for many organizations.

Switching from maintaining their own mail servers to Google is saving ASU $500,000 US dollars alone, not including the administrator labor savings. Again, some corporations might feel their e-mail is too "secret" to be outsourced like this, but for college students who spend all their creative talent posting things on MySpace and YouTube, and faculty who spend their careers TRYING to get published, they have nothing to hide from the rest of the world. It makes perfect sense.

Best of all, Google isn't charging ASU anything for this service. Google is able to cover the costs from advertising revenue instead. I can think of a lot of companies that might want to advertise to a demographic of "40,000 students who are mostly 18-25 years old and all live in or near Tempe, AZ".

In the list ofTop 10 Best Presentations Ever is Seth Godin talking about Marketing at Google. The video is worth watching.

technorati tags: ASU, Arizona State University, Google, Presentations, Marketing, Seth Godin, Tempe, Phoenix, e-mail