G-Cloud gets more services and easier to use

As the Government’s G-Cloud 5 framework comes into play the new search capability has received praise from Databarracks’ Managing Director, Peter Groucutt, while Carrenza and Silverbear have partnered up to provide a SaaS-based membership management service aimed at Government and Public Sector requirements.

Groucutt’s praise follows the recent announcement  by Cabinet Office minister, Francis Maude, that public sector organisations have now spent £175m procuring IT services through the framework, almost doubling the spend since January this year. Groucutt sees the potential for this value to rise as being greatly enhanced now that the search functionality used in the G-Cloud appstore, CloudStore, has been significantly revamped.

This first saw the light of day just after Easter, and is currently in Alpha testing as the Digital Marketplace. This will eventually be the replacement for CloudStore, and one of its objectives is to include more than just a specialist search engine. Instead it is being aimed at helping Public Sector organisations find things – literally help them pin down what it is they really want to achieve and then identify the applications and services best-suited to the requirement.  

 “From the buyer side, what you really want from the CloudStore or the Digital Marketplace is to go to one procurement tool and use it to find the services you need, create your long-lists and short-lists and then buy the service from the supplier,” Groucutt said. “Our expectation of how accurate and simple a search process should be comes from our use of search engines like Google. In fact, we have heard a lot of feedback from G-Cloud buyers that in order to find services, they have to go outside the CloudStore to search for services in a search engine, then go back into the CloudStore and find the suppliers by name.” 

“We have tested the CloudStore to see if customers will be able to find our services.  If you search for `backup’ for instance, you would expect the first results you are presented with to be backup services. Until now, that hasn’t been the case. The results you actually receive might be an infrastructure or platform service, but one that includes `backup’ in the description.”

According to Groucutt, the improvements to functionality of the new Digital Marketplace, which will replace the current CloudStore for G-Cloud 6, will be significant. It will actually prioritise titles and descriptions so users will start to get the right results. In addition, it promises a better, more user-centric approach to search altogether. 

“The new search technology will make the whole process much more user-friendly, allowing users to search more quickly and easily, and most importantly provide them with the most relevant results,” he said. “It’s great to see these changes happening; now the key is to ensure a continued level of improvement across all areas of the framework. The latest figures reported by Francis Maude are promising, but for the public sector to continue to make the best use of services available to them through G-Cloud, other concerns need to be addressed too.

“Education is still seen as the biggest barrier to cloud adoption by the public sector. More needs to be done by central government to educate local authorities and councils on the benefits of buying services through the framework.

“Making G-Cloud really work is a big task, but it’s encouraging to see that steps are being taken to address the quick-wins like “search” that will deliver big impact quickly. The framework is maturing and both customers and suppliers are beginning to see the benefits. It’s still very much a learning process and further investment is needed to break down the last remaining barriers.” 

Meanwhile Carrenza, which already has a track record providing Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud services to Government and the Public Sector and has been accepted onto the G-Cloud framework as an IaaS provider, has partnered with membership software provider, Silverbear, that will see them jointly delivering a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) membership management solution on the G-Cloud 5 framework.

The partnership provides users with an easy-to-implement solution that reduces costs and ensures government departments have the expert help they need to manage their membership processes.

Silverbear’s membership management solution enables public and regulatory bodies, trade associations and professional membership organisations to optimise member engagement and income. It is already widely used by many professional bodies that support large numbers of staff within government and the wider public sector.

The Silverbear Membership service is now available hosted on Carrenza’s IaaS via Lot 3, as a SaaS offering, available on a per-user pay-per-month utility price model.

The partnership between Silverbear and Carrenza was formed based on Carrenza’s proven track record in partnering with other application providers to enable secure and highly resilient ‘as-a-Service’ solutions to both the public and private sectors.

 “We were impressed by Carrenza’s commitment to delivering IL3 secure services to the public sector as well as their proven track record in delivering scalable and flexible solutions via a channel partner model,” said Silverbear Managing Director, Mark Travis.

In addition to the public sector, the new solution is likely to benefit a large number of Silverbear’s non-public sector customer base as well.