UK Government G-Cloud project - Sales Information

G-Cloud is interesting. What G-Cloud is doing as far as I'm aware is making a lot of government IT stuff into a commodity. So, for instance, something like making a Wordpress theme or providing a hosting service, that becomes a commodity service. There are then pre-approved suppliers. This is kind of sensible: in the private sector, I don't have to go through a complicated process to decide whether to use Rackspace or Linode or EC2 or whatever for a small project.

(Incidentally, just because it's called G-Cloud doesn't mean that all or even most of the things they are spending money on are "cloud computing" services, but then that's a big fuzzy bullshit word anyway. Pretty much everything these days involves putting things on the Internet, so I guess it could be claimed to be cloud computing since there are computers hooked up to The Cloud, formerly known as the Internet).

The problem is that quite a lot of technological spending by the government isn't on commodity stuff but on custom development work. And because of the procurement process, that often doesn't get done in a lean manner. (But I don't know, I'm just a developer. I only play a bureaucrat on TV.)

Security wise it is a not great. You can see Symantec Ltd is paid a fair bit so can make some fair assumptions upon AV software used by certain departments. MOD suppliers listed, thats a social engineering opertunity for some right there.

Interesting some of the companies are very dependant upon there goverment contracts and looking at some It looks like they were born out of them. I'm sure somebody more versed in company background checks could provide more insight into the onteresting choices and somebody who currently active in pen testing could provide a better insight into how this data can be leveraged.

Still at least its out there to be discussed, kudos to the goverment for that.

This is a good step forward for the UK government. It would be even more useful if it was also available as CSV for easier analysis when the data gets larger.

Interesting that Huddle was paid GBP 442,429 (around USD 700k) in the 5 months. Their annual turnover at April 2011 was GBP 1,568k so that's a sizable amount (although they've grown since then). It seems that the government might consider a better negotiation strategy given how much their spending with Huddle.

(Sad to see that Huddle requires the calling of a premium rate number in the UK. It's like expecting US customers to call a 1-900 number to speak to sales)

Interesting, and a step in the right direction, but one has to wonder, if they were to make more detailed information available, how much money could they save by armchair analysts offering pricing and purchasing suggestions.

Unsurprisingly this is entirely missing operating costs...

Surprising not to see Rackspace or Amazon on the list!