Mark Gorman

With Chris Chant announcing his imminent departure, is this where the G-Cloud programme turns into what many have claimed it always was…vapour?

In being so forthright with his views on what is acceptable and, far more clearly, what is unacceptable, Chris has doubtlessly alienated large parts of the traditional Systems Integrator community who have been waiting for the moment to get their revenge.  Some will be thinking that the time is right. 

I will bet that they’re wrong.  Chris has established a strong and vocal community of support for G-Cloud and that support will continue under the watchful eyes of Liam Maxwell, Continue Reading

The top suppliers of IT to government have changed little over the last decade. Sure, HP toppled BT when it bought EDS, and CSC moved pretty dramatically up the list when it won significant NHS business and further up when it took over Accenture’s contracts.

The names in the Top 20 will be familiar to anyone in the IT industry – they have been referred to as an oligopoly and even a cartel (though apparently not in the legal sense of the word). Together, the top 5 (HP, BT, Fujtsu, Cap and IBM) have something like 60% of the total that government spends on IT. EMC isn’t to be found on the top 20 list and probably not on the top 50 list – but other product companies are, including Dell, Cisco, Microsoft, and Oracle as well as emerging solution organisations such as Computacenter and SCC who are looking to expand beyond their legacy offer.

But government is changing its buying approach. Its recent actions make it plain it is looking for a change Continue Reading

G-Cloud is live. After one of the shortest, leanest procurements in UK government history, we’re told that 1,700 services are available to government from nearly 300 suppliers. Although the process was short, for many suppliers this was hard work – often the first time they have dealt with government or the first time they have encountered terms such as “impact level 3″.  Crunching through the results must have been a challenge for the Cabinet Office team too – credit to them for getting there.

The question for many suppliers, though, will be “what now?”

Where are the customers?  Who do we talk to first?  How do we monetize the investment we have made in setting up this IL3 infrastructure at our cost?  Chris Chant has mentioned, several times, that Marks and Spencer don’t ask their potential customers “how many of you will buy a shirt?” Continue Reading

From speeds and feeds to per user per month IT in the public sector is changing in a big way.  The era of a single huge prime contractor is coming to an end.  Clients and suppliers have had 20 years of it, some good, some bad, some doubtlessly terrible.  I’m not sure, though, that either party is quite ready for the IT transformation that is coming.

Public sector bodies, both big and small, have been accustomed to year-long procurements, beating down the suppliers on price, seemingly never ending transition periods, costs in the tens and hundreds of millions per year. What do they have to show for it? PCs that take an hour to boot in the morning, downtime that is easier to measure than uptime and a desktop setup that they had at home more than 5 or even 10 years ago.

Now they’re going to be buying in a different way and expecting radically different results. Signs of this new approach are already evident. For instance, over 150 staff in the cabinet office , the very heart of government ,already uses macs, gmail and open office tools. Skeptics will say Continue Reading