The Cabinet Office reckons three-quarters of the contracts dished out on public sector IT services catalogue Cloud Store have gone to SMEs. The claim was made in response to feedback given to The Channel from some suppliers who suspect G-Cloud biz is dominated by the same integrators that monopolised wider public sector IT …

COMMENTS

House rules Send corrections

This topic is closed for new posts.

Thursday 16th August 2012 10:52 GMT Anonymous Coward

Experience backed up by the numbers

So, anecdotally, as an end-user, I think the catalogue is rubbish. Anecdotally, the suppliers agree. And the numbers say it's generating bugger all in contracts. It's not so much a question of changing cultures, but of providing a usable website

0 0
Thursday 16th August 2012 11:01 GMT Hawknic

Typical spin

Given that Pareto (or something close) generally applies to most statistics in business, then 75% of contracts going to SMEs could easily amount to about 20-25% of the value. Giving the percentage based on value would actually indicate the amount of business, Maude knows this very well and is just spinning the numbers to make himself look like he gives a toss.

Also: 75% of the contracts for a measly couple of Million, out of the billions spent by government? No wonder smaller companies not already on the gravy train (if they had a significant government contract they would no longer be SMEs) are heading for the door.

0 0
1. Thursday 16th August 2012 12:07 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  Re: Typical spin
  
  Maude - spin? Heaven forbid. The Cabinet Office spawns success after success. There's nothing that the crack team of iPad-toting Silicon Roundabout rejects cannot improve, with just a single click of their magic Ruby-on-Rails slippers.
  
  1 0
  1. Thursday 16th August 2012 14:22 GMT xyz
    
    Re: Typical spin
    
    2 things.. having seen the guff, sorry presentations, spewed by silicon airheads various, I can totally, brilliantly state that they will save the gov tonnes of cash (I'm taking the piss here)...so that's the blue corner.
    
    In the red corner, we have civil servants various who have the cash and no clue what to do with it; who wouldn't change anything unless it was signed in triplicate in their mother's blood twice and because that sentence doesn't make any sense, they'd set up a committee to study it for clarity and report back..sometime.
    
    At an operational level the whole thing is a car crash, with the usual suspect ambulance chasers (no names, no laywers) providing rescue services for the usual consideration.
    
    0 0
Thursday 16th August 2012 12:05 GMT Kay_terra

Surprised?

ERG driving departments to cut the length and tie in of major contracts, but such leviathains as DWP and HMRC retain either a single, or set of contracts with tier 1 suppliers and despite these being 'non-exclusive' they still do not procure outside them as the cost of doing so would negate any savings.

Unless the centre begins to enforce the absence of these integrator contracts, business will keep going to them and not to SME.

0 0
1. Thursday 16th August 2012 21:28 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  Re: Surprised?
  
  We tried to get our SME suppliers to sign up to GCloud, so that we could avoid an expensive retender when their contracts expired. They tried, couldn't make sense of it, and gave up.
  
  0 0
Friday 17th August 2012 14:58 GMT Ian Moyse

A Cloud too far?

The G-cloud Cloudstore is a necessary evil. The government needs to be seen to be forward thinking and supporting change and the cloud so it spends likely a large sum of money to launch and create this framework and vendors have to be seen to take part, less not being on there hurts you negatively. However I concur a lot of the purchasing will follow the same historical routes until any mandating can be put in place (if it even can) to drive government departments to consider the cloud, British Suppliers and SMB/E providers against their legacy large vendor brand name contracted supply chains.

Ian Moyse

0 0