The Government Needs to Answer back

One of our more noisy US colleagues recently stated that the UK Government needs to do more in the cloud.  Given our experience the UK Government is doing lots in the cloud, they are just not doing it with our US colleague.
So I thought it would be helpful to provide a few examples of what the UK Government is doing in the cloud with my company @UK PLC a single UK cloud provider.
The major projects so far this year are as follows:-

• February this year the National Audit office used our cloud services for an in depth analysis of NHS procurement (£ 500 million savings identified)
•  August go live of the worlds first nationwide B2B card based marketplace for all UK Universities and Colleges
• September launch of nationwide schools marketplace with all items carbon neutral voluntarily offset  by the suppliers as part of a drive for savings and sustainability(another world first).
• September start of data collection for the NHS carbon footprint project another world first looking at the carbon footprint of all the items purchased by the NHS.

Last year Richard Benyon the Minister for the Natural Environment launched our Green Marketplace and we passed the £ 100 billion of spend Analysed. We have users from every single major public sector body on our system, which we would suggest is a reasonable level of engagement in the cloud for a single supplier sample, and that our Government is doing interesting and innovative things.

New email system is brilliant

@UK PLC’s new cloud email system is brilliant.

I am in the midst of parallel running our new cloud email system vs Microsoft Exchange, and we have just been sending out 100’s of thousands of emails as part of our new green marketplace launch. The new cloud email system has been fast and responsive through out, where as exchange has frozen the computers that are connected to my exchange account.

I wanted to make sure that customers were not upset by our sending out emails, and so had all the emails send out with delivery and read status turned on to feedback to my own email address.

The result was hundreds of thousands of mails hitting my account at the same time, which was a great test of both systems.  Sue and my pc’s ground to a halt with outlook connected to exchange, but my PC was fine when just connected to our Cloud Email 4 business system.

In terms of managing the email, it was quick and straightforward with a reasonable imap client.  I have been experimenting with Mutt, which is brilliant if you like vi.   However, the great thing about imap is that virtually all email clients from Outlook to thunderbird support imap and work fine.

I was able to move tens of thousands of emails around quickly from folder to folder, and I was delighted with the speed and responsiveness. It was remarkable how much faster it was than exchange, especially as exchange is sitting on our local network and has about 30 accounts and our cloud email 4 business is in a remote data centre and has tens of thousands of domains a huge number of clients.

We are going to try and switch over from Exchange to cloud email 4 business as quickly as we can.