Who we are

Advice Cloud are a team of public sector procurement specialists and technology framework experts. We believe in the potential of harnessing the public sector’s purchasing power to create wide-scale change in the UK and beyond.

People and the planet rely on governments to make equitable decisions, and procurement has a major impact on society and the environment. The UK public sector spends £113bn a year with private sector organisations!

Advice Cloud exist to ensure that the public sector can deliver digital transformation effectively, for those who rely on public services.

We do this by ensuring that ethical, progressive suppliers have an opportunity to sell their technology services to the public sector. We think that public organisations should buy from suppliers who are socially responsible, have sustainable and ethical supply chains, and are committed to making ambitious improvements to their products/services/operations.

Our goal is to enable the public sector to procure the best available technology and ICT services, fairly and compliantly.

The Advice Cloud story (so far)…

Advice Cloud started as a small idea from our CEO Chris Farthing, who was impressed with the scope and promise of the flagship Crown Commercial Service framework G-Cloud. Having worked on it before as a buyer and realising that many suppliers needed advice on how best to use it, Chris started helping suppliers get listed on the framework on G-Cloud 4 (back in 2013!).

On G-Cloud 5 in 2014, Chris had supported his first three formal clients to get listed on the framework. This led Chris to realise that the work helping software suppliers to navigate G-Cloud was essential and something he believed would be of great benefit to the supplier community.

This meant that in late 2014, Advice Cloud grew into an actual company. Moving into their first offices, and supporting on further frameworks such as Digital Services (now DOS) and Network Services 1. Before again returning to G-Cloud 6, now with 14 clients successfully listed on the framework.

2015 – 2016 were the formative years for the Advice Cloud company. Working on many iterations of G-Cloud within this time, seeing the birth of the Digital Marketplace – and its full potential, and hiring the first official employees for the company. It was also in this time that we partnered with our long time Strategic Adviser Jos Creese.

When G-Cloud 9 arrived in 2017, it was evident that Advice Cloud’s services and support became an essential part of the supplier community. With big changes to the framework G-Cloud, and the client base growing rapidly. Meaning a further extension of amazing staff! Growing our Client Services team into a fully fledged group of experts at hand to support further procurement queries alongside framework submissions.

In 2019, Advice Cloud further diversified into more frameworks. With a bigger team of specialists on board, we were able to support technology suppliers providing other solutions, not just those on G-Cloud and Digital Outcomes & Specialists. We successfully listed all of our clients on the Network Services 2 framework, most of which were SMEs.

Into 2020 saw big changes to the way that Advice Cloud work, and we’re sure we’re not alone. After the COVID-19 pandemic, our team went fully remote. A challenging change, but one that saw us become more flexible and able to re-adjust our teams to best support our clients.

Since 2021 we’ve started our journey to become a Teal based organisation, partnered with amazing organisation such as Stotles and Positive Planet, and (with the introduction of compulsory Social Value criteria in Government policy) took our first steps in becoming Social Value accredited and Carbon Net Zero.

We achieved Social Value Quality Mark (SVQM) Level 1 in January 2022. As we developed our processes and advice to not only help suppliers win public sector business, or buyers to procure easier, but to better procurement as a whole. Now in 2024, we work hard to build a community of technology suppliers and buyers who fairly, compliantly and transparently use frameworks and procurement methods to help better public services.