G-Cloud sales hit £1.39bn with central government the biggest spender

Local government uptake still way behind, though

Sales on the G-Cloud platform have now reached £1.39bn after the government finally updated the dashboard for the service.

Overall G-Cloud sales in July were £62.2m, a slight decline on £65.5m in June. Sales made to SMEs account for £753m of the total to date, while large enterprises have made £640m from sales on the platform.

This suggests that the government's ambition to use G-Cloud to ensure that more IT spending goes to SMEs has worked, but the fact that 90 per cent of suppliers on G-Cloud are classed as SMEs shows that many buyers still prefer large, traditional suppliers.

This is most likely because the majority of purchases have been made by central government, which accounts for £1.06bn of all spending on G-Cloud, and those making the buying decisions may be more comfortable using large firms as they have always done.

Meanwhile, local government lags behind on £73m of all sales ever made on G-Cloud. Not-for-profits are at £11.2m and the wider public sector, covering areas such as the emergency services, is at £245m.

The huge disparity between central and local government spending is perhaps not surprising given the cloud-first policy mandated on Whitehall departments.

However, the relative lack of interest from local government will perhaps frustrate those behind G-Cloud, as it suggests that most councils and authorities ignore G-Cloud when making IT purchases and still go through traditional channels.

This doesn't necessarily mean that they are not embracing cloud services, just that they do not use G-Cloud as means of procurement.

The update comes around two months after the launch of G-Cloud 8, which saw 757 new suppliers added to the platform, 94 per cent of which were SMEs. This was the largest new influx of suppliers since the service launched.

There are now 2,726 suppliers on the platform offering 26,000 services.

Read the Computing Cloud & Infrastructure Review 2016 for more insights on how organisations approach the cloud.