After many years of legal struggle and two separate procurements, Google was finally awarded the contract to provide email and messaging for Interior’s 90,000 employees. This can only be viewed as a bad thing for Microsoft and their cloud email solutions built around Exchange. Gmail is now used by NASA, the Department of State and GSA amongst others and Google is now seems to be the system of choice. There is a nice summary of the history of the procurement on the Wall Street Journal.

There is plenty of information on the web about this contract and award, but here are some pretty good links that will give you all the information you need.

• The contract was actually awarded to Onix Networking, a small business based in Ohio. They are a Google Apps Premier Enterprise Reseller.
• Here is the notice of award on FedBizOpps. The contract was award on April 30th, total value of $35M, with initial funding of $17K.
• The RFP documents are all listed here, or you can just look at the Statement of Work.

And this is the press release from DoI on this award.

Some facts and figures about the Department of Interior email and collaboration:

• 91,000 email addresses
• 30,000 distribution lists. That is a lot of distribution lists
• 12,000 Blackberries, but only 2,000 iPhone/iPads.