Sep 28, 2010 09:57 GMT  ·  By

T

he state of Minnesota has made a deal with Microsoft and embraced the cloud computing services by agreeing to an application outsourcing deal.

The Office of Enterprise Technology (OET) in Minnesota agreed to use Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) hosted services.

BPOS will support several needs of the state, including email, instant messaging, conferencing and web-based collaboration, according to the press release emitted yesterday by the OET.

The deal was already sealed last week, and its terms will apply to “all executive branch agencies”, and if other government agencies, educational institutions, cities or counties want to join, they are free to do it, said the OET.

Among other things, BPOS services will expand the email storage capacity from 100MB to 5GB and is expected to ensure data privacy too.

Gopal Khanna, Minnesota's state chief information officer, released a statement saying that “in fact, the superior architecture of the applications and the state-of-the-art physical security of Microsoft's facility increases data security several fold, providing an instant upgrade to the State's security profile.”

The state of Minnesota signed a “no access by other Microsoft customers” dedicated hosting services contract, which adds to the existing 2009 contract for using Microsoft Exchange as OET's email platform.

Microsoft's BPOS services have gained a few government adherents, like the city of Buda, Texas, which chose Microsoft's BPOS for e-mail services over bids by Google and other hosted service providers.

According to a Microsoft blog post, the company and Google are now competing for a possible hosted e-mail contract with the federal government's General Services Administration.

In August, Microsoft announced a Government Cloud Applications Center that will connect government organizations with Microsoft's partners building applications, Redmond Channel Partner reports.

These applications can be built based on BPOS hosted services or Windows Azure, Microsoft's cloud computing platform.