UK buys time with £1.65B extension to G-Cloud framework The UK government is extending two major cloud purchasing agreements due to delayed replacement arrangements under frameworks that could be worth an additional £1.65 billion. The cloud services framework deals – which allow for purchasing under pre-defined arrangements – were supposed to end on April 28 next year, but have now …
i'm on the gcloud & DOS. its almost impossible for smbs and micros to get any work.
this will be another £1.65 billion for the big indian outsourcers who seem to be getting ALL the work.
Crown Commercial should be more like a service integrator & take groups of smaller UK businesses , thus getting a big chunk of that money back in taxes AND giving UK kids career options, rather than giving all the work to shysters like wipro infosys TCS & the multitude of other indian firms who call me up demanding 20 years of experience for £200/day inside ir35.
Government should prioritise its buying & planning to provide jobs & options domestically rather than pumping money out of the country & literally making IT ax dead end career now.
i guess the british establishment doesn't want highly skilled tech industries just cap doffing street cleaners
up demanding 20 years of experience for £200/day inside ir35.
But they charge client £1000-2500+ a day. IR35 enabled massive extraction of value from British talent.
IR35 only applies to worker owned business, so these big consultancies exempt from it can make massive profit from it.
Same, we ended up not bothering to renew. There seems to be either a misunderstanding about how to use G-Cloud or some other reluctance as the civil servants seem to prefer running a procurement. G-Cloud is supposed to be like a catalogue that you buy from, using the search query terms to narrow down the number of results you get to a reasonable number.
>” Crown Commercial should be more like a service integrator & take groups of smaller UK businesses”
That will require a complete change of an institutionalised conservative mindset.
Remember way back at the beginning of G-Cloud, the UK had a couple of home grown UK cloud providers who were focused on delivering to the UK government/public sector, they were all wound up because the lowest price wins mindset which naturally leads to the principle “ use its spending power to strike better deals with the top cloud providers” ie. Ignore the domestic economic benefit of government expenditure. Additionally, they failed because the government couldn’t get its act together and actually fund/pay these providers to scale up and so create the capacity government was wanting…
Given the number of large datacentres various government departments ran, the contracting out of G-Cloud to “the top cloud providers” rather than keep it wholly in-house always seemed to be an act of self harm and a missed opportunity. Ie. The UK public sector is rubbish at getting stuff done because of decades of conservative dogma inhibits entrepreneurial thinking.
they were all wound up because the lowest price wins mindset
Dead right on “lowest price wins” - it’s not just short-sighted, it’s institutionalised negligence. Multinationals deliberately undercut to build dependency, throw in a few glossy slides, hint at post-retirement perks, and watch procurement drones wet / cream themselves over “cost savings.”
Meanwhile, these same firms dodge UK tax like it’s a sport. So public money flows out, zero value stays in, and we systematically dismantle any chance of a sovereign tech ecosystem - all in the name of “efficiency.”
And the regulators, watchdogs? They exist to create the illusion of scrutiny while rubber-stamping the slow-motion fire sale of national capability.
They should reconstitute the CCTA with a 10 year plan to grow to run Sovereign Cloud and have in-house technical expertise…. who are also UK Taxpayers.
They could also define a standard repeatable ERP solution for UK Government that actually works … or low expectations isn’t shit.
CCTA sad shadow of its former self …. with the beancounters all that are left running the endless rounds of Procurement Frameworks. They were thrown into the trash by the Tories (Francis Maude), and continued by NuLabour.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Computer_and_Telecommunications_Agency
The cloud providers can charge what they want. What's the government going to do? Huff and puff and make statements in the House of Commons. But they will DO nothing.
The problem really started with the arch idiot John Harvey-Jones. His mantra and method, in one short sentence, was: don't build it, buy it in. They bought it in alright, and now they can't buy their way out.
Cloud computing, from the likes of AWS, Google, MS, should be seen as a loss of sovereignty (admitted as such by MS in France) and a threat to national security. Then maybe the potato heads in government will think different(ly).
Who voted this down? Explain yourself.
The last thing UK Plc should be doing is buying cloud compute from a US provider. We have to buy from a UK or EU equivalent or set it up. Or we are literally dead.
The government has to lead from the front here. We can't moan that all the money gets funneled to the US if we keep buying from them.
Out of the £3.7bn spend on GCloud 13 to date, over half £1.97bn is in "cloud support services" which are supposed to be about transitioning to or between Cloud services. Mostly this is just used as a route to market for public sector to buy any consultancy services - for example, £68m to CapGemini, £54m to Gartner, £34m to KPMG, £26m to Hunter Healthcare Resourcing, £23m to Alpine Resourcing. It would take someone in CCS about a day to go through the spend of the top 30 suppliers to see which (if any) were real Cloud support and which were not, but they can't be bothered.
