For G-Cloud to succeed, Databarracks calls for patience and continued effort from both buyers and suppliers

The government cloud procurement initiative G-Cloud has just celebrated its first birthday and the deadline for submissions to the G-Cloud iii framework is the 6th of March.  At these milestones, it is understandable to reflect on the success of the programme.

There have been several scathing reviews of the project, but Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider Databarracks praises the work of G-Cloud, and urges patience, allowing the project time to succeed.

"It is just too early to judge the success of G-Cloud," says Peter Groucutt, Managing Director at Databarracks.  "While it is a year old and sales figures haven't set the world alight yet, a huge amount of progress has been made.  The hard work has been done in the last year and we would be staggered if those figures aren't significantly higher for year two."

"With G-Cloud iii, there are going to be more suppliers and more services.  As more suppliers become accredited to the higher Business Impact Levels, buyers with more stringent security needs will also have more choice," adds Groucutt.

"The project is incredibly ambitious and the team running G-Cloud is actually very small. There is only so much they can do. It is worth noting that some of the large suppliers will have more people in their public sector sales teams than G-Cloud currently has running the programme."

Groucutt does concede that the procurement process has been difficult: "For those who are used to working in the private sector, the GPS eSourcing portal will be a surprise.  The user interface looks old and it isn't intuitive to use at all.  This is the standard Government Procurement Service portal, and to be fair to G-Cloud, they are improving their part of the process.  The G-Cloud catalogue which is in Alpha stage at the moment is a huge upgrade from the big, unwieldy spread sheet suppliers had to complete for G-Cloud i and ii."

The reason for disappointing sales according to Groucutt is that public sector buyers and suppliers are stuck in a vicious circle: "Vendors are reluctant to invest time and money without seeing the success of G-Cloud but buyers won't start using the CloudStore until the suppliers make the effort to populate it.  Really, it has to be the suppliers to make that first step."

Groucutt suggests the key next step to ensure that G-Cloud is success is to improve awareness on the buyer side:  "We have spoken to IT buyers in the public sector and at the moment, the number who really understand G-Cloud and are actually using it is very low," adds Groucutt. "Suppliers are making the first step now to provide a good variety of services on the framework, now we public sector buyers to start using it".

"We shouldn't write the programme off yet.  The first year has been a learning experience for everyone involved, but now we should really start to see results."