Monday, July 8, 2013

Cloud Vs System Integrators…the UK Story

Its tough to pick out Cloud success stories in the government, given the privacy concerns of recent past. But the G-Cloud seems to have a way of bubbling up to the surface. Below is an excerpt from such a case study.

Faced with a £52m bill from a large IT vendor for hosting "a major programme" the UK government decided to turn to commodity cloud services.

The result? It picked up a comparable service from a smaller player for £942,000.

Commodity cloud services are delivering savings that put prices charged by large systems integrators to shame, according to the UK's tech chief.

Spend on G-Cloud services is growing rapidly, passing £25m in May, but is still tiny compared to an estimated annual public sector IT spend of £16bn. However this could pick up even more sharply as long-term contracts with large systems integrators expire.

"The majority of the large contracts finish by 2014-15, so there's an enormous amount of change underway at the moment," said Maxwell.

Maxwell has plenty of government IT horror stories of his own, telling the conference it historically cost government £723 to process each payment claim made by farmers to the Rural Payments Agency.

"It would be cheaper to rent a taxi put the cash in the taxi, drive the taxi to the farm and keep a manual record than it would have been the way the outsource contract worked," he said.

Read on @ http://www.zdnet.com/here-are-another-51-million-reasons-why-the-cloud-is-winning-7000017639/

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