Their biggest savings have been IT infrastructure costs because guess what everything is routed through google now and they need not worry about maintaining servers, upgrading, licensing etc.
At this point if you are wondering what google apps are then it is a good time to check this link:
I was very impressed with the fact that putting your email system on the google cloud would mean a big performance improvement right away. For the City of Westerville, it took away the need for internal spam check and vastly improved performance. There was a slight increase to bandwidth use however but that was made up by other benefits.
Some concerns I have are security but goggle has been addressing that diligently.
The email system also integrates with Microsoft Outlook if you are looking for a non-web solution.
Google Apps are already targeting government organizations and they have a specific platform for them. The price of using the apps is $50/person/year which would greatly reduce costs for an organization. Having consulted with a city agency for a long time, I think it would greatly benefit such organizations as it would free up resources invested in IT infrastructure projects for other more important projects.
