The cost savings are substantial. The Outlook/Exchange platform involved a AU$33 million contract and took four years to go live, although it’s unclear why it took so long. The Gmail/Google Apps rollout, which is being completed by subcontractors, will cost just $9.5 million and should be live by the end of 2008. User storage will increase from 35 MB to 1 GB.
This is being called the largest single deployment of Gmail in the world, we’ve emailed Google for a comment.