The government’s eleventh iteration of the popular G-Cloud procurement framework has been released, with a staggering 4,200 suppliers now signed up.
For an organisation such as Aqilla (a member of the G-Cloud initiative since it’s 6th iteration), seeing the continued growth and support for businesses such as ourselves can only be seen as a positive.
With years of experience in providing solutions to public sector organisations, Aqilla is well positioned to supply cost effective financial systems that meet the demands of the modern Public Sector organisation.
By successfully securing a presence in their services list, Aqilla will have better access to their public sector customers. This strategy will allow us to take advantage of new technologies in order to deliver faster business benefits and reduce costs, as well as meet even more desirable environmental and sustainability targets.
The G-Cloud is the UK government’s online procurement framework. Started in 2012, G-Cloud set out to provide the public sector with a supplier list of cloud specialists, with the goal of simplifying what was an increasingly complicated procurement and tendering process. The initiative received a push in 2013 as the coalition government adopted a “Cloud First” policy for public sector IT to support the growth of cloud computing services in the UK (), ensuring that cloud-based services were increasingly valued by public sector decision makers.
A procurement framework is a collective agreement that standardises the procurement tendering process, enabling buyers to tender for services without suppliers needing to respond to a vast variety of time-consuming tender processes.
In the case of G-Cloud, suppliers provide a variety of information on their business, including but not limited to the type of service they provide, the security and accreditations of their service, pricing and terms and conditions.
In an increasingly competitive marketplace, the G-Cloud acts as a ‘one-stop shop’ for increasingly time-pressured public sector workers, allowing them to easily identify suitable cloud services providers, ask them questions and compare them against each other.
The list of suppliers has now reached over 4000, with the vast majority of them (over 90%) classified as Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SME’s). This could result in greater access to niche and specialist suppliers with the time to provide the tailored support that would otherwise be difficult to find from larger organisations that provide an all-encompassing mass-market solution.
Allowing SME’s with typically less resources to compete on an equal footing for tenders with larger-scale organisations whom would otherwise dominate the market, allows for an increase in fairer competition, whilst providing such businesses with the opportunity for more work.
Additionally, by standardising the tender process, private sector organisations competing for the tender are more likely to spend the time on the application, knowing what requirements will be needed and fewer left-field curveballs to destabilise their bid, should continue to see an increase in contracts being awarded through the initiative.
Aqilla’s G-Cloud page can be found here.
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