Appirio bringing Google Apps to more universities nationwide

ZDNet

...Appirio steps in to help the university with initial planning, tuning the platform’s architecture, the actual implementation, and training employees about the new capabilities. Ryan Nichols, vice president of solution marketing at Appirio, said that a lot of the existing platforms at these schools are “older and brittle…so we have to be more careful about the migration plan.”

One of the reasons why universities are moving to the cloud, particularly with Google Apps, isn’t too revolutionary: the promise of cost reduction. That’s fairly standard at this point.

Nichols also pointed out another reason: students are coming into college with different expectations as they are likely already educated in some sort of cloud collaboration. He also noted what impact this will have on the next generation of the virtual workforce...