Major enterprise systems are starting to look at - and move - critical information systems to non-Microsoft platforms like Google. Gmail’s growth as a consumer email system has been impressive, but now it takes another step by servicing a major municipality. Are large enterprise customers next? Of course they are. This is a major threat to Microsoft’s core business and one of the first shots of enterprise level cloud computing. InformationWeek has a great article on reasons why LA selected Google over Microsoft here

There are lots of cloud computing companies that are building speed and adding customers, but the concerns around protecting sensitive information if you can’t lock it down on your own servers has held back the explosion at the Enterprise level. Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is driving the storage and performance for lots of small to mid-sized startups in our area (including my company Optify). Having the storage on an as needed basis with high capacity and significant up-time is fantastic.

It will be really interesting to see how Microsoft responds to the Google threat at the Enterprise level.