G-Cloud sales pass £750m mark
More than £36m spent in August as sales pick up for government programme after a slow summer
G-Cloud, a framework listing approved service providers for the UK government, has passed the £750m mark in terms of sales, after £36m was spent in August alone.
The framework, which is in its sixth iteration, has made £753.2m in sales since it began in March 2012.
In August, the biggest deal was between NHS North of England Commissioning Support Unit and the end user NHS North Yorkshire and Humber Commissioning Support Unit, who spent £803,125. This was followed by a deal between the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) and Beaumont Colson for just under £700,000.
Meanwhile, there were 225 purchases made by local government bodies during August, the largest of which was the £325,000 paid to professional services firm Deloitte by Hampshire County Council for ‘specialist cloud services'.
Curiously, according to the data, Amazon Web Services sold 1p worth of services to the Cabinet Office. But perhaps this is because the Cabinet Office may have to pay the vendor on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Of the £36m August purchases, £28m was for ‘specialist cloud services' used to support transition to Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions - whether or not this actually counts as cloud services is debatable, and something Computing looked into when it asked how G-Cloud could remain a success.
Of the remaining amount spent: £4.22m was spent on cloud infrastructure-as-a-service products, £3.54m on IaaS, and just £469,000 on cloud platform-as-a-service products.
August was a relatively successful month for G-Cloud, after several slow months in the summer.
To date, more than half (51 per cent) of total sales by value and 60 per cent by volume have been made to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), while the vast majority of sales (77 per cent) were with central government, that is about £578m. Local government bodies have spent a total of £44.3m, accounting for just 5.9 per cent of spending on the framework.
The seventh iteration of G-Cloud is to go live on November 23.