Dr. Rosio Alvarez, CIO at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, is overseeing a new effort to take the lab to Google Apps. As it stands, Berkeley Lab “serves the computational needs of scientists that carry out over $0.7 billion of sponsored research in quantitative biology, nanoscience, new energy systems and environmental solutions, and the use of integrated computing as a tool for discovery.”
While Berkeley is not using Google Apps to carry out the computationally-intensive tasks it tackles on a daily basis for its diverse stream of ongoing research projects, it is making the move to further consolidate its IT department for reasons of sustainability and ease of collaboration as well as overall cost reduction. According to Rosio Alvarez, “the Lab expects to realize financial savings as a result of the transition. The final numbers are not available yet but the estimates range in the area of $1.5M-$2M in savings over the next five years in hardware, software and labor costs.”