Warwickshire County Council last night became the first winner of the Cloud Pro award for best cloud initiative.
The council, which ditched Lotus Notes Mail for Google Apps and is set to be a pilot for how local authorities handle the G Cloud initiative, was commended for its boldness in going down the cloud path.
For the Cloud Pro award - part of the inaugural IT Pro awards, held in central London last night - Warwickshire beat a shortlist of the Open Cloud Initiative, Rackspace and the Ministry of Justice. The Open Cloud Initiative was highly commended for its attempt to establish a genuine vendor-independent body for promoting open cloud standards.
Tonino Ciuffini, head of information assets at the council, accepted the award, telling us they were honoured to have their efforts recognised in this way.
"The credit should go to our internal team led by James Smith," he added, "but also a big thank you to our external G-Cloud partners, Chris Chant, Tim Hanley at the Home Office, Eilenn Logie at DWP and Darron Stronge at the CESG. They have helped make it a real cross public sector initiative."
Other winners of the IT Pro awards included Microsoft for best vendor, Iomart CTO Bill Strain for best IT leader and the IT department at Rider Levett Bucknall for best team. To complete the set, product awards went to Apple MacBook Air 13in 2011, Skype for iPad and Ipswitch’s WhatsUp Gold Premium, while Race Online snaffled best IT initiative.
