Government to consult industry on cloud platform standards

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The UK government is using the cloud to streamline and open up the procurement process for public IT contracts and standardise the platform to get better value for less cost for the tax payer.

   Speaking at Cloud Expo Europe in January, Liam Maxwell, the director of ICT Futures at the Cabinet Office, said the government’s G-Cloud programme will mean a reduction in the lengths of contracts from years to months which he described as a “massive step change”.

   The IT advisor to the Cabinet added: “The two things we need to focus on are the platform and digital services. The government  has over 330-400 ‘black box’ projects that have created their own platform.  We need to move towards a common platform.”

   He said the Government was committed open procurement and open standards and that it wanted to give all suppliers “equal access to the market not just equal opportunity”. 

   Maxwell said the government would announce shortly a software standards consultation.   “This is absolutely crucial. We are looking at open standards of software to encourage interoperability of different applications which allows Government department to run their IT services better for less.”

   He added: “We are agnostic about open source and proprietary software.   Are we going to use procurement to give open source software a leg up? No.”

   He said that in future the government will be publishing what he called ‘pipelines of work’ to help suppliers with their planning and development.  They will be further helped by the standard platform.  “The key thing is we have a government platform on which it makes sense for a small business to invest the time energy and effort to create software and services for that platform,” he said. “So far we haven’t been able to do that because we had 300 different platforms across government.”

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Over 4500 technology decision makers attended Cloud Expo Europe which is expected to be even bigger in 2013 when it runs 29th & 30th January.