In total there are over 1700 services that made it through the G-Cloud framework accreditation process and are now available in a searchable catalogue at www.gov.uk/cloudstore.
On first sight, aside from the new breed of SME providers who’ve made it onto the initial ranking, the big winners are Microsoft – the CloudStore itself has been built on Microsoft Azure – and SAP - whose Business Objects and Business ByDesign ERP offering are among its entries onto the catalogue - as well as Google which makes it onto the list which conspicuously doesn’t have a lot of the better known ‘Cloud champions’ from the US.
With the government’s stated policy to include more SME engagement, it’s clearly encouraging to see SMEs such as UK Plc, Unit4 and Huddle are among those making their presence known while the CloudStore itself has been built by UK SME Solidsoft – a task completed in less than four weeks.
Notably absent are Salesforce.com, whose government ambitions are well documented, and Oracle, already one of the main providers to the UK public sector market. The former will ultimately benefit from a UK data centre later this year, while the latter’s ‘Cloud conversion’ doesn’t seem to have come in time for this first tier.
On the other hand, the ‘revolution’ contains a lot of familiar names. HP – the biggest single provider to the UK public sector, makes the grade. Being at loggerheads with the government over the National NHS IT Programme hasn’t prevented Fujitsu and CSC getting into the catalogue. IBM, CapGemini and BT are all present as are other ICT and services giants such as EMC, Dell, Steria, Atos and Capita.
The CloudStore – like the rest of the G-Cloud programme – is an evolving beast - and as such there will be additions and further iterations to come. Eleanor Stewart of the G-Cloud Programme Team states:
“We are now looking to our users to feedback on what works well or what needs improving so that we can continue to develop the CloudStore. We hope that this site will help us to make the big step change in the way that suppliers and buyers do business on ICT services in the public sector. ”
---
Autor(en)/Author(s): Stuart Lauchlan
Quelle/Source: Business Cloud9, 19.02.2012
Bitte besuchen Sie/Please visit:
