UK government puts £750m on the table as it looks to deal directly with cloud providers
- Reference: 1607088550
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/12/04/uk_government_put_750m_on/
- Source link:
The Crown Commercial Service (CCS), run by the Cabinet Office, is putting together a framework agreement for public sector bodies to buy from, the plan being that bulk buying will make cloud services from the friendly neighbourhood hyperscalers more economical.
With a potential three-quarters of a billion pounds on the table, the aim is to create "a route for UK public sector organisations to buy their IaaS and PaaS requirements directly from the owners of public cloud platforms," according to [1]a tender notice published today .
It defines requirements as "pure" compute, and doesn't include design, configuration, tailoring, management, or professional services. "The services can most simply and usefully be thought of as a commodity 'utility' service where buyers connect to and use the supplier's platform and processing resources for their own requirements,” the tender said.
The CCS imagines applications processing large sets of data, such as apps for weather prediction or modelling medical scenarios, among the use cases. The government only wants bids from providers with "full and exclusive control" of the infrastructure that underpins their platforms which are capable of providing the services primarily from within the UK. The contract is set to last four years and bids must be in by 14 January 2021.
But the framework will not be the only avenue available to public-sector buyers attracted by the promise of cost savings on their cloud environments. The CCS has also penned [2]One Government Value Agreements (OGVA), a three-year Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with AWS, Azure and GCP - the big three cloud providers - and others. The agreements mean that all purchases by public-sector organisations will be treated as though they are made by one large enterprise client, but does not necessarily cut out resellers, some of whom were keen to get involved.
[3]IBM , [4]HPE and [5]UKCloud have also signed up to the MoU.
The UK government's desire to work directly with big vendors is not limited to the cloud. In June [6]it put out feelers to figure out what the prospects of working directly with the big application vendors might look like, according to a prior information notice that could lead to a £400m procurement.
In fact, Crown Commercial Services oversees frameworks under which central and local goverment cough in excess of £18bn worth of taxpayers' cash on goods and services ever year. And CCS takes a 1 per cent commission on each penny spent.
It is little wonder CCS CEO Simon Tse's "ambition" is to "reach £30bn of spend from a baseline of £13bn in 2017". His organisation is on the [7]look out for a CDIO to help it get internal systems up to snuff.
A senior source close to government frameworks told us there are too many frameworks being run and it is confusing for public sector buyers and tech makers. "It's time and sweat," he said of the process. ®
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[1] https://ted.europa.eu/udl?uri=TED:NOTICE:586968-2020:TEXT:EN:HTML&src=0
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/02/aws_signs_memorandum_of_understanding/
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/30/ibm_ukgov_cloud_framework_deal/
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/18/ukgov_hpe_cloud_mou/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/29/ukcloud_latest_to_sign_memorandum/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/05/uk_government_tender_erp/
[7] https://www.civilservicejobs.service.gov.uk/csr/jobs.cgi?jcode=1696988
[8] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Actually I always thought it utterly ridiculous that the same electricity coming over the same network of wires from the same power station can be bought from different utility companies. It is merely an artificial construct to create an illusion of competition to get around the monopoly rules when the electricity industry was privatized.
The difference is that electricity is fungible and has something stronger than assurances and audits to prove it isn't exfiltrating your data.
Who has bought a stake in the company that gets the deal?
The governments' view seems to be that we need to privatize all public money.
But the plus side is that this means that after the first hack we will have publicized all government data. Oh wait, no - they are just going to put public data in the cloud, MP's expenses will still be stored on their phones.
Any chance...
...that some of that moolah might go into hiring a bunch of knowledgeable cloud-techies to work for the public sector directly, so they can understand the requirements and ensure best value? Rather than hiring in expensive consultancies to tell the public sector what it needs?
Thought not.
> you must have full and exclusive control of the infrastructure which underpins the platform used to provide the services
AWS could not have written a friendlier requirement. This means that the tender is being pitched as one that is simply to buy "utility" services, and as such they want to buy directly from the supplier cutting out the middleman. This seems reasonable, but there's going to be absolutely nothing stopping those credits bought for the "utility" services (ec2, s3 etc.) being spent on non-utility services (e.g. Redshift et al). That's where they'll end up being spent, but the tender isn't open to any competitors (your Snowflakes and suchlike) on the non-"utility" front. Absolutely absurd.
Let's put this another way. When you purchase your electricity supply from your *actual* utility company, do you require they own and operate all the underpinning infrastructure? No, you absolutely do not. Because the entire point of a utility supply is that it is interchangeable with any other utility supply and thus the suppliers compete on price and overall service. This contract is a complete inversion of the utility principle to build the kind of lock in we've not seen since IBM were cool.