The opportunity for suppliers to join the government's £60m G-Cloud framework is drawing to a close, according to Mark O'Neill, proposition director for innovation and delivery at the Government Digital Service.
The government plans to launch the first tranche of the G-Cloud catalogue in February, O'Neill told the Cloud Expo event in London last week. The G-Cloud procurement process was extended last year to give more suppliers the opportunity to participate. At the end of December, there were more than 500 expressions of interest in joining the framework from suppliers offering more than 1,600 cloud services.
"The billions which we spend on IT is fundamentally changing, because too much goes on systems that are unacceptable," O'Neill said. "Cloud can disaggregate systems and do things differently and dramatically cheaper."
Ultimately, "we either grab the opportunity, or we give up", he added.
With G-Cloud, the government hopes to gring about a reduction in its datacentre costs, in part by using public cloud providers where possible and by increasing the use of small businesses as providers. However, changing the culture of civil service procurement will be a "substantial challenge", Martin Bellamy, a member of the G-Cloud delivery board, admitted in September.
O'Neill has first-hand experience of cloud computing: the Government Digital Service (GDS) rolled out cloud-based desktop services to 125 of its users in October. Over the last four months, the cloud software has worked out 80 per cent cheaper than a traditional on-premise desktop set-up, he said.
"At the moment, that is for the cost of the desktop services that we use," he told GGC. "So that is for email, collaboration and standard services where we are paying 80 percent less than equivalent users."
O'Neill said he would never again purchase outright software for email, collaboration, instant messaging, databases, file storage and printers. "I have not printed out anything for six months," he told the audience.
This story originally appeared on Guardian Government Computing.
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