Total sales through G-Cloud hit £1bn

The G-Cloud sales total rose by £47m in January alone

Nearly four years on from the launch of G-Cloud in 2012, and the government's cloud procurement framework has seen over £1bn of sales made through it.

The G-Cloud sales total rose by £47m in January to reach a grand total of £1.006bn, indicating that the public sector is increasingly attracted to cloud services, products and consultancy.

Following the trends of previous months, 52 per cent of sales by value and 62 per cent of sales by volume have been awarded to small and medium enterprises.

This breakdown has remained fairly consistent over the past two years, demonstrating that the G-Cloud framework has been successful at allowing smaller companies to compete with large corporations for government contracts.

Some 76 per cent of the purchases made through G-Cloud have been taken up by central government, while the wider public sector accounts for the remaining 24 per cent.

These figures fluctuated by one per cent compared with the previous month, but do not indicate a major shift in spending on cloud services in or beyond Whitehall.

The Cabinet Office has once again failed to update the dashboard that breaks down the G-Cloud spending in more detail. But it would not be surprising going on previous trends to see that specialist cloud services contribute most to the G-Cloud sales pot, followed by software-as-a-service and infrastructure-as-a-service.

The government's Digital Marketplace IT procurement service saw a £5m sales hike in January to £47m. SMEs contributed to 40 per cent of the sales, while 87 per cent of the procured services and products went to central government.

The sales performance of both frameworks demonstrate an appetite for more digital services in government, which will be good news for Government Digital Service director Stephen Foreshew-Cain, who is charged with driving the government's digital transformation.

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