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Cabinet Office: Hey, forget those multi-BILLION pound deals...

...public sector buyers spent £10m on G-Cloud in October

The Cabinet Office has insisted the multi-billion pound software and hardware framework that is about to surface will complement and not overshadow its cloud-first policy.

At the end of October, some £63.4m had been transacted on CloudStore since its launch in March 2012. The web catalogue lists accredited public sector suppliers' services but was initially shunned by procurement people.

In an attempt to get things moving and alter old buying habits, procurement heads in central government were then mandated to use the cloud as their primary vehicle to source goods.

This is having an impact, as £10m was spent on the portal last month, – the most to date – but by way of contrast this pales into insignificance when stacked up against the £2.4bn worth of product frameworks that are coming, not to mention the pile already in use.

Despite this, the Cabinet Office stuck to the party line and talked up the G-Cloud framework, which includes CloudStore.

"G-Cloud allows the public sector to buy the IT services it needs when it needs them rather than forcing customers to design complex solutions from scratch," a spokesman told us.

There are nearly 1,200 suppliers selling 13,000 services on the store, and Cabinet Office anticipates "50 per cent" of "new" central government spending to be funnelled through it.

“G-Cloud is designed specifically to procure cloud-based services not IT hardware, and where it is not appropriate to procure through the CloudStore, we need to ensure that other frameworks are in place.

"All planned IT procurement activity for central government and the wider public sector is being designed to complement our cloud first policy," the spokesman added. ®

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