Buying Solutions plans £600m managed services deal

The Treasury's purchasing agency is looking for up to 10 suppliers for a pan-government managed IT services framework. Buying Solutions said the two-year procurement agreement will provide public sector and associated organisations with end to end IT managed services. This will include the management of servers, desktops, …

[John Chadwick]

That's a well though through requirement.

One assumes they are looking to turn all of this into a commodity service, but if you think about who can actually do it all, it's even more frightening.

Can wee look forward to a lot of smaller companies and niche players being forced out of business.

This certainly raises the entry costs into the government market, at the expense of smaller companies. In fact it might well force out some very well known names. Design, Build, Operate is where the money is. If you take away most of the operate, expect application build costs to go through the roof.

[John Smith 19]

Another year, another govt framework agreement

So how well did the others work out?

Seems like the Civil Service merry go round has cycled again and another bunch of suckers has fallen for this BS.

This stuff *always* looks good on paper. Senior civil servants (and the large IT service outfits that can support them) have peopel whose job it is to do so.

I expect several references to synergy and shared resouces.

Good managmeent learns from its mistakes.

Anyone remeber the National Framework for NHS IT?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do they even bother....

They go through all of this only for EDS (sorry I mean HP) to get the contract. As an incumbant provider they are so tied into the different departments, it would be difficult to move away without major disruption.

I remember when our servers moved to another provider, we had nothing but problems for weeks afterwards trying to access our systems.