How to save money via G-Cloud

There are many drivers for cost savings when buying on G-Cloud some of these include:

• Transparency – the published cost is what you get, so can see the actual cost and more easily compare it with other G-Cloud suppliers, existing contracts or other sources.  In reality, there is still some way to go on G-Cloud to ensure you are comparing “like for like” but this will improve with future iterations.

• Buying from the actual supplier – a customer can purchase a service direct from the actual supplier without intermediary’s markups.  Again, in practice the customer needs to be careful that they are actually buying from the supplier rather than an intermediary.

• Smaller suppliers are accessible to customers.  G-Cloud’s cost of procurement is less than traditional public sector procurement so smaller companies can get onto the framework and have a route to market, often for the first time.  This increases the options for customers, who will have a greater choice of suppliers.

• Specialist and niche suppliers are visible to customers.  SMEs are often deep specialists in a particular type of IT service, and can apply their skills and knowledge to bring innovative approaches to the customer which would not be visible when working through intermediaries or with larger, “general purpose” suppliers.  And innovative approaches lead to better, as well as cheaper, solutions.

With the Cabinet Office’s desire to slash £1.2bn off central government hosting costs this year – G-Cloud approved SME suppliers like Memset are in a good position to deliver low-cost, high-security, high-efficiency cloud services, whether IaaS, PaaS or SaaS, which will be to all our benefits.