G-Cloud By The Numbers (April 2014 data, released mid-May 2014)

I haven’t looked at the G-Cloud spend data for a few months (the last review was in December) – something changed with the data format earlier in the year and it screwed up all my nicely laid out spreadsheets; I’ve only just got round to reworking them.

– After 25 months of use, total spend via the framework is £175.5m

– Spend in all of 2013 was £85m.  Spend in the first 4 months of 2014 is £81m, about 46% of the total spend so far

– The run rate for 2014, if that spend rate continues, is perhaps more than £240m.  I suspect we could see much higher than that given the expiry of many central government IT contracts in 2015 and 2016 (and so an increase in experimentation, preparation for transition and even actual transition ahead of expiry)

– The split between the lots in December 2013 was Lot 1: 4%, Lot 2: 1%, Lot 3: 16%, Lot 4: 78%

– As of now, the split is similar: 6%, 1%, 14%, 79%
 
– The 2014 year to date split is little different: 8%, 1%, 12%, 80%

Conclusion:  The vast bulk of the spending is still via Lot 4 – people
and people as a service.  I’d expected that to start changing now, with the Digital Services Framework fully live.  That said, Lot 4’s spend per month has changed little since November 2013, except for a peak of £23m in March (roughly double the average spend over the last 6 months) which you can easily see in the graph above

Conclusion: Infrastructure as a Service (from Lot 1) is gradually increasing – it’s gone from c£800k/month to c£1.5m a month in the last 6 months.  Again, there was a peak in March, of £2m. 

Conclusion: It’s an old cliche but plainly there was a bit of a budget clear out in March with departments rushing to spend money.  March 2014 spend was £30m – roughly double any other month either side.

– In December 2013, BJSS was the largest supplier, followed by IBM.  Today, BJSS are still number 1, but Methods have moved to number 2, with IBM at 3.

– The Home Office is still the highest spending customer, at £24.7m (nearly double their spend as of December).  MoJ are second at £16.7m with Cabinet Office third at £12.5m

– The top 10 customers account for 50% of the spend on the framework. 
The top 20 make up 67%. That’s exactly how it was in December.  More than 100 new customers have been added since December, though, with over 470 customers now listed.

– Some 310 suppliers have won business.   The top 10 have 32% of the market, the top 20 have 47% (that’s a better spread than the customer equivalent metrics)

– Last time, the lowest spending customer was the “Wales Office”, with £375.   We are at a new low now, with “Circle Anglia Limited” spending £63.50 (I wonder if the cost of processing that order was far greater?).

–  Thirteen customers have spent less than £1,000.  Thirty one have spent more than £1m

Conclusion:  Much the same as in December – Adoption of the framework is still spotty, but it is definitely improving.  A greater spread of customers, spending higher amounts of money – though mostly concentrated in Lot 4. 
A few more suppliers have likely seen their business utterly transformed with
this new access to public sector customers.

Overall Conclusion: G-Cloud needs, still, to break away from its reliance on Lot 4 sales.  Scanning through the sales by line item, there are far too many descriptions that say simply “project manager”, “tester”, “IT project manager” etc.  There are even line items (not in Lot 4) that say “expenses – 4gb memory stick” – a whole new meaning to the phrase “cloud storage” perhaps.

Still, there is no other framework in government that gives access to such a wide variety of suppliers (many new to the public sector) and no framework that publishes its information at such a transparent level.  For those two reasons alone, G-Cloud still deserves applause – and, as it grows month on month, I hope that it will only get louder.