The UK government’s new procurement process, G-Cloud, is failing to cut through enough red tape to be of any use at all.
The government hit on the idea of G-Cloud to encourage small vendors to pitch against the larger IT companies by using an online “App Store”.
But Memset founder Kate Craig-Wood – who became involved in 2009 – said the plan is falling short.
Writing in her bog she said: “We passionately believed in the dream of G-Cloud and kept doing so despite the goalposts being repeatedly moved, the marketplace continuing not to function properly and buyers continuing to behave in the same old ways.”
Since 2011, the G-Cloud has totalled more than £1 billion in sales, which is more than enough to get the government spinners claiming it is a success. But it would appear that some
However, the Infrastructure-as-a-service sector in which Craig-Wood operates has been tricky than other areas of the framework, which don’t need so much supplier investment.
Memset has had to make huge investments to job through the government’s hoops on security. It has had to invest £2 million on a high-security data centre.
But if you invest you should get more money back right? Memset only saw a return of £100,000 per year and no new business since 2013.
Now it is getting too late for small business. Microsoft and Amazon cloud services will knock all the small providers out of the market because they can produce economies of scale. The government is not really interested in propping up the small businesses, it wants to reduce the costs. It also is not moving much stuff to the cloud as it originally thought.
Craig-Wood thinks that the old procurement practices are still at work and this requires armies of sales teams to tackle. This was exactly the sort of thing that G-Cloud was supposed to bring to an end.
