The top tech bought on G-Cloud

A lot of solutions have been procured by the public sector through G-Cloud. In this blog, we look at what technology is being snapped up and also what to expect with G-Cloud 11.

Since G-Cloud burst onto the scene it has racked up around £4.37bn+ of spend through the framework. We’ve analysed the most recent sales data to see what kinds of solutions are selling, which sectors are buying what – and predicted what this might mean for G-Cloud 11.

What’s selling well?

Out of the three Lots, Cloud Support services are certainly the most bought accounting for 71% of all spend through G-Cloud, totaling a cool £3.1bn.

Cloud Software takes the second spot, with 15% of all transactions. Unsurprisingly, the average contract value through Cloud Software and Hosting is a lot less than that through Cloud Support.

Although Cloud Hosting is trailing behind Lot 2 and Lot 3, responsible for just 13% of the spend on G-Cloud, it still has a nice £586m slice of the G-Cloud pie. If you delve a little deeper into the Hosting figures there aren’t any shocks to be had as the contracts are split mostly between the big players. For instance, UKCloud have made £88m in total – the fifth highest contract across all Lots on G-Cloud (Go UKCloud!).

Who’s buying it?

By far the biggest users of G-Cloud is of course Central Government. This is most likely down to the Government Cloud First policy, which states that government organisations should be considering cloud solutions first and foremost. The government even went as far as to target a spend of £1 in every £3 on SMEs by 2020 when procuring services. With this encouragement to do business with SMEs, government buyers will look to frameworks like G-Cloud to find their suppliers – and G-Cloud is one of the best for smaller companies (90% of suppliers on the framework are SMEs!).

Although not spending nearly as much as Central Government, other sectors are still buying through the framework. And interestingly, half of all business procured by other sectors that aren’t Central Government is from SMEs!

Who’s buying what?

One of the organisations spending the most through the framework is the Home Office, spending over £630m in total. In fact, 30% of that sum is spent procuring services from smaller businesses! This is down to their increasing focus on developments such as cloud Information Systems surrounding counter terrorism, and also launching schemes like this Crowd Safety app.

Another Central Gov organisation getting the most out of G-Cloud is the Ministry of Justice. With a goal of migrating all of their digital systems to a public cloud, they’ve been hard at work on the framework!

HM Revenue and Customs are buying the most from SMEs, though. With 75% of their procured services being supplied by smaller business. They recently launched their new Making Tax Digital service and are preparing infrastructures ready for post-Brexit, such as a new online Customs Declaration Service.

What does this mean for G-Cloud 11?

With G-Cloud 11, we can most likely expect to see the same patterns continue. The biggest deals will likely still be coming courtesy of central government for now. We may start to see more services being procured by local government as word starts to filter down about G-Cloud and how quickly innovative tech can be procured and implemented.

In terms of tech bought in the future we can only speculate! But, there does seem to be a keen interest from government at taking advantage of newer tech such as AI and RPA. Organisations such as the DWP, and even MI5, are looking at bringing this in so we could start to see these solutions shifting more via the framework. And the DWP, after being ‘distracted by problems with universal credit’, look set to finally green light their online pension dashboards. Showing that integrated systems and managing data will still be a big priority for many departments.