SaaS Firm Says UK Cloud eProcurement Portal A Flop

Enterprise cloud hosting firm Memset has some bad news: The U.K.’s efforts to adopt a more sophisticated cloud and IT eProcurement portal is far from a success.

According to reports on Thursday (June 16), Memset Managing Director Kate Craig-Wood is threatening to take the business out of the G-Cloud platform in response to what she called “pitiful returns” for the company, described as a “G-Cloud champion.”

“We are seeing an utterly pitiful return via G-Cloud — about £100,000 a year,” the executive said in a company blog post. “We do have a fair bit of other government business now but not via G-Cloud.”

The G-Cloud is an initiative aimed at helping government entities adopt cloud computing services and other IT tools through collaborations with cloud suppliers, like Memset.

Craig-Wood stated that the government’s G-Cloud portal leads to only 6 percent of its overall revenue — “nowhere near enough to make it a profitable venture,” she said.

She added that, as the government looks to roll out the eighth version of its G-Cloud framework, Memset is now questioning whether it’s worth it to remain in the program.

Reporters spoke with the executive for additional information; Craig-Wood explained that Memset invested millions of pounds to maintain public procurement security standards to qualify for winning contracts through the government cloud procurement platform. But without the returns to justify the investment, she added, Memset growth has slowed.

She also pointed to a lack of adoption among public sector organizations using its Public Services Network (PSN), despite assurances that a PSN would be used heavily. Instead, government organizations are “side-stepping” PSNs, she said.

This isn’t the first time the G-Cloud framework has faced criticism. Last year, a study conducted by Socitm said that, while 90 percent of the public service providers have either already implemented or are planning to implement cloud computing projects, most didn’t obtain that solution via G-Cloud.