Memset MD forms 10% group

New Group of Cloudy SMEs Established To Give Feedback To Cabinet Office
 
IT Entrepreneur and founder of Memset, Kate Craig-Wood, in her capacity of representing all British Cloud SMEs at the European Cloud Partnership (ECP) steering board has convened a group of cloudy SMEs to help give feedback to the Cabinet Office on the GCloud and more generally on the UK and European approach to cloud.
 
In response to a request from the Cabinet Office to glean input from SMEs and their experiences to date with the GCloud, Craig-Wood has formed this collective known as the “10% Group”. They claim that whilst the GCloud is starting to change the way the public sector buys commodity IT services, it still has a long way to go.
 
The group, formed with representatives from Asidua, Automated Intelligence, Hao2, Digi2al, Magic Milestones and Shaping Cloud said that security and accreditation have been serious blockers to SMEs gaining market share. New entrants are being stalled by PSN not delivering IL3-accredited connection services yet, and the GCloud accreditation processes are a moving target and very labour-intensive, with nugatory parallel processes for PSN adding to the load.
 
As a result, they believe that SMEs have only really received 10% of the awarded public sector (as confirmed by the latest figures from the Cabinet Office), despite the fact that the Government’s stated aspiration is that 25% of public sector spend will eventually go to SMEs.
 
But members of the 10% Group have been impressed with the cultural and behavioural changes to date in getting the public sector behind the GCloud and believe that the move from GCloud being a project to becoming a GDS business will enable changes to be made and resources applied to make GCloud a success as a shop for all commodity services and products across the public sector.
 
Kate Craig-Wood, MD of Memset, said: “As well as heading up the 10% Group, I have also been appointed to the European Cloud Partnership (ECP) steering board with the mandate of representing all British SMEs’ interests. With the help of my team I am collating the views, issues, troubles and successes of these groups and feeding them back into Intellect, the Cabinet Office, G-Cloud programme and ECP.”
 
If you are a principal of a SME that is going places in Cloud then please get in touch with Robin Pape at Memset.