Venyu Blog

Back in October 2000 when then candidate for President George W. Bush described then Vice-President Al Gore’s economic figures as “fuzzy math,” media analysts and other political gadflies made a lot of hay out of W’s lack of intelligence when it came to crunching government-generated budget numbers.

Flash forward to May 2011 and I’m the one trying to figure out what otherwise could easily be construed as “fuzzy math.”

But first some context. In my recent post, The Government’s “Late-Mover Advantage” and Why You’re On The Hook for IT,” I mentioned that among the initiatives being considered to reduce the number of physical servers distributed among more than 2,000 datacenters by moving them to the cloud was moving 950,000 email boxes across 100 email systems to said cloud.

In an effort to quantify potential savings (and after all that’s how the government works out their numbers so they look more impressive than they really are), this week the General Services Administration (GSA) has estimated that, “based on an average cloud email cost of

$14 per month per mailbox, taxpayers will save $1 million annually for every 7,500 federal email boxes that move to cloud-based services, or 44% as compared to existing on-premises email systems.”

Now, full disclosure: I’ve never excelled in math but it seems to me using the GSA formula it comes down to something that looks like this:

950,000 current email boxes

$14 per month at current cost per mailbox=$160M per annum

Therefore:

950,000/7500=126 (representing a single instance of 7500 federal email boxes)

126 instances (each representing 7500 mail boxes) x $14 per month, per mailbox, per year =$21,168 per instance (or 7500 mail boxes)

Cumulative savings: $26.67M (moving all 126 instances to the cloud at $21,168 per instance) or a savings percentage of about 16.66% (in other words, modestly lower than the 44% claimed)

Oh and did I mention that the government has issued a solicitation for cloud email, cloud office automation services (like word processing and spreadsheets), and cloud-based records management services that will be worth up to $2.5 billion over five years?

According to the solicitation GSA is looking for email services that meet a number of specifics, including a minimum 5-GB mailbox size, mobile device and browser support, spam and virus filtering, remote provisioning, trouble ticketing and help-desk support, summary reporting on management stats, and 99.9% uptime. It also asks for instant messaging, calendaring, archiving, and e-discovery capabilities.

Of course it’s a “gimme” that the $2.5 billion award allocation is not exclusively measured against savings to be realized by moving these million man (and woman) mailboxes to the cloud, but if the government’s numbers are overly-optimistic (and I think they are), then it stands to reason our taxes may not be applied (that is, consumed) as precisely as we might otherwise hope or the government bean-counters would have us believe.

I don’t know about you but in terms of things being fuzzy when it comes down to the federal government and “the cloud” I have to agree with “W” and find that 11 years after he took the former Vice President to task over his estimates, the numbers are as vague and as ambiguous as ever.

But true to form, if you’re counting on exact ROI for your tax dollars from the federal government I’d say—as Thomas Jefferson once observed—“People get the government they deserve.”

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