Government IT contracts capped at £100m

News that no government information technology contract should be worth more than £100m according to Cabinet Office is welcomed by SME, Memset who believes the move will help to remove further barriers to public sector cloud computing adoption and encourage a more open marketplace.
 
Whilst many have seen the measures as being too restrictive, Memset firmly believes that the rules published by the Cabinet Office last week are good news for all suppliers of cloud services, especially SMEs. “Limiting contracts to £100m does not constrain SMEs but does help put an end to the mega-contracts which were the norm until recently, and the rules still allow departments to make a case for exceeding the limit where they can justify it” said Robin Pape, Memset’s Public Sector Advisor.
 
The Cabinet Office reforms also limit new hosting contracts to two years, and put a stop to automatic contract extensions, again welcomed measures from Memset.
 
“All suppliers like to win longer contracts but restricting hosting contracts to two years is not an issue for true cloud suppliers who stick to open standards, as we do, so that customers can easily migrate their data and applications to new suppliers, maintaining competition and downward pressure on costs,” continued Pape.
 
Cloud services supplied by Memset via the CloudStore framework are easy for public sector customers to adopt with services deployed within hours of contracts being finalized.
 
A further measure introduced by Francis Maude is making suppliers choose whether to be a service provider or service integrator, but not both, for a particular customer.  “This will also drive the move to the cloud model and a more open marketplace.  We welcome this announcement and the commitment to rigorously enforce these measures,” concludes Pape.