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Los Angeles County Launching Microsoft Cloud for 100,000 Workers

En Pointe Technologies has been awarded one of the largest state or local Microsoft 365 contracts ever written.

Los Angeles County is rolling out one of the largest Office 365 implementations in state and local government this year. On June 18, vendor En Pointe Technologies announced it was awarded a five-year contract to support a Microsoft 365 project that will bring services to more than 100,000 employees across 36 departments.

The project equates to $72 million in licensing revenue, and the county says the technology will save $2.5 million in annual costs after the first year, offering relief on current licensing agreements and in-house email operations costs.

En Pointe specializes in Microsoft systems integration and licensing, and currently manages several of the county’s license agreements.

County CIO Richard Sanchez said the technology will enable all kinds of employees, like law enforcement officers, public health inspectors and social workers, to access information securely from any location, making the county more productive and flexible.

The county wanted to gain all the benefits of an enterprise agreement throughout all its departments, Sanchez said, so this arrangement allows smaller and mid-sized departments to gain access to technology that they would otherwise be unable to afford.

The county’s goal, Sanchez said, was to get a common platform where all the county’s departments could leverage all the tools and products available from Office 365.

"We’ve been working on this kind of arrangement for quite some time to consolidate some licenses," he said. "Basically, we had 16 enterprise agreements in place amongst the 37 county departments that we have.”

This project -- scheduled to be completed in less than 10 months -- will change all of that.

Colin wrote for Government Technology and Emergency Management from 2010 through most of 2016.