Wanna slice of £6bn? Set up an IT supplier and apply to the UK.gov The tender for the UK government's colossal IT supply framework, worth up to £6bn over four years, has finally landed on the desks of would-be suppliers – months after it was first expected. UK.gov procurement body Crown Commercial Services has dispatched copies of the Computer Equipment and Supplies (CES) tender, initially …
Some of these frameworks have been set up to try and break down the amount which is supplied by "the same old faces".
G-Cloud is claiming a high proportion of sales by SME vendors (about 60% to the end of March 2014) on sales of £175 million. That said, as a buyer, G-Cloud needs serious work if it is going to be genuinely useful. At present it is a long way from offering quick and easy procurements of commodity style products and services which it offered buyers at its inception.
I think if you look closely at G-Cloud stats large chunks of the volume of the "SME" sales are contract agencies or thinly disguised contracting agencies i.e. "consultancies" that deliver largely via contract resource. While strictly speaking they are SMEs I doubt that's the spirit of what G-Cloud was trying to achieve.
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Surprised that more people arn't questioning the £6bn over 4 years. That is as much as Google's *global* annual spend while they are rolling out datacenters. For dealing with a tiny fraction of the number of individuals the UK gov spend should not be anywhere near this much.
We are not even remotely getting decent value and the excuse that spending is propping up the economy simply doesn't fly when this is getting lost at the higher echelons and never reaching the grass roots workers.
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