Last week, the Cabinet Office published the latest figures for G-Cloud spending. The data runs through December 2013. Here are the highlights – call it an infographic in text.:
– After 21 months of use, total spend via the framework is £92.657m
– Spend in all of 2013 was £85m
– Spend in the last quarter of 2013 was £35m. That would suggest a run rate for 2014 of some £140m, assuming no growth (or decline)
– Lot 3’s total spending of £15m (over 21 months) is only marginally higher than the total spend in November 2013 (of £14m)
– The split between the lots is Lot 1: 4%, Lot 2: 1%, Lot 3: 16%, Lot 4: 78%
– Taking the spend over 2013 only, those splits don’t change much: 5%, 1%, 15%, 79%
– Over the last quarter of 2013, the splits change a little: 7%, 1%, 10%, 82%
Conclusion: The vast bulk of the spending is still via Lot 4 – people and people as a service. That may soon change given that there are other frameworks available for taking on people, including the Digital Services Framework and Consultancy One. Lot 4 spending was down to £9m in December (from £12m in November) – that’s more likely because it was a short month than any sign of a trend.
Conclusion: Either Infrastructure as a Service is ridiculously cheap (not yet exceeding £1m per month) or there is little appetite yet for serious tin by the hour usage. In all likelihood, with most departments tied into existing outsource contracts, only a few are breaking out and trialling Lot 1. With contracts expiring over the next couple of years and the Crown Hosting Service perhaps appearing at the turn of the year, we may see real changes here.
– IBM is no longer the largest supplier by value of business done, the new winner is BJSS Ltd (a supplier of agile consultancy) who clock in at £7.2m. IBM are second at £6m.
– The Home Office is still the highest spending customer, at £13.9m. MoJ are second at £9.2m.
– The top 10 customers account for 51% of the spend on the framework. The top 20 make up 66%. There are nearly 350 individual customers listed.
– The lowest spending customer is the “Wales Office”, with £375. A dozen customers have spent less than £1,000. Oddly, last time I checked this data, Downing Street was the lowest spend at £150 – that entry is no longer in the sheet as far as I can tell. Perhaps they got a refund.
Conclusion: Adoption of the framework is still spotty. A few customers have massively taken to it, many have dipped their toe in the water. A few suppliers have likely seen their business utterly transformed with this new access to public sector customers.
