G-Cloud 13 post-mortem
Use market data to understand where the opportunities were on G-Cloud 13 and what this might mean for G-Cloud 14.
Introduction
The G-Cloud 14 ITT went live on 19th February, meaning the G-Cloud 13 framework is in its final months as the key route to market for cloud-based products and services suppliers.
To date, £16.74bn has been spent on G-Cloud across its thirteen iterations with the amount spent growing with each iteration and year-on-year.
Understandably, with the push towards a cloud-first public sector, G-Cloud is Crown Commercial Service's most sought-after framework and it is essential to many tech businesses' public sector GTM.
So, with suppliers preparing their bids for the new iteration of the framework to meet the 7th May deadline, it's important to understand just how valuable G-Cloud 13 has been and where its opportunities lie.
Aims of this post-mortem:
- Provide data to help you make the most of the final months G-Cloud 13 is live
- Help you understand the trajectory of G-Cloud to anticipate how G-Cloud 14 can play a role in your pubsec sales strategy from 24th November 2024
Spend patterns
Spend by year
Spend on G-Cloud has increased with every iteration of the framework and year-on-year* since its inception in 2012.
Some reasons for the increased use of G-Cloud include:
- Cloud First Policies: The UK public sector has been following a ‘Cloud First’ policy since 2013, and it has been a flagship policy since 2019. It was introduced to help improve speed of delivery, increase security and create opportunities for innovation across the public sector. These policies have, undoubtedly, pushed both buyers and suppliers towards using a cloud-specific framework with increasing priority as more suppliers move away from on-premise offerings.
- SME Spending Target: 90% of the suppliers on G-Cloud are SMEs, and it’s a key route to market for small businesses looking to work with the public sector. In 2015, the government set the target for one-third (33%) of public sector spending to be with SMEs and, as frameworks are a highly accessible way for SMEs and buyers to access through their catalogue format, and provide buyers with the information they need to make informed decisions and be assured SMEs can deliver, even if they lack the reputation of larger suppliers.
- Competitive Edge: G-Cloud has become increasingly popular as it enables suppliers to gain a competitive edge across the public sector. The exclusive opportunities, like direct awards and mini-competitions, which take place on frameworks mean that suppliers who aren’t selling through frameworks miss out. Transparent pricing also allows suppliers to competitively price their products and services against their competitors, thus driving more suppliers to use frameworks like G-Cloud.
- Streamlined procurement: Suppliers on G-Cloud can bypass the red-tape of standard procurement processes like tendering as a result of the pre-approval process required to list on a framework. G-Cloud assures buyers that suppliers comply with strict government standards, including security, data protection, and accessibility, reducing the risk and associated vetting involved in procuring tech in the public sector.
*As the 2023/24 FY has not ended, the data displayed in the graph does not accurately represent a full year of G-Cloud spend.
Spend by quarter
While the use of G-Cloud has increased year-on-year, G-Cloud spend does vary across each quarter within those years.
The most spend tends to occur in Q4 (January-March), which makes sense given public sector buyers are reaching the end of their financial year and will be using up any budget before it resets in April.
The lowest spend occurs in Q2 (July-September). The summer period is when the public sector slows down during the school holidays and parliamentary recess, slowing the public sector sales cyle resulting in fewer procurements through frameworks like G-Cloud.
As with the graph above, the data displayed for FY 2023/24 (particularly for Q4) does not accurately represent a full year of G-Cloud spend.
Use the Q2 lull to get ahead when buyers are back in office from September. Being proactive during slow periods by looking for upcoming expiries, building relationships with buyers, and looking for early buying signals will set you up to win contracts in the second half of the financial year.
Spend by sector
While G-Cloud is the biggest framework for tech providers, it is used to different degrees by buyers. This section will breakdown where spend is co
Spend across Central Government
Overwhelmingly, G-Cloud is most used by Central Government organisations to procure from suppliers across every iteration of the framework.
While 77% of spend does come from Central Government, given the size of the opportunity offered by G-Cloud, the spend across Health, Local Government and other areas of the public sector are still sizeable players on G-Cloud.
Central Government (£12.6bn)
Health (£1.3bn)
Local Government (£1bn)
Other (£1.8bn)
The trend across both the G-Cloud and Digital Outcomes and Specialists (DOS) frameworks (which Crown Commercial Service reports on collectively) is that the majority of spend activity occurs with Central Government buyers.
The top ten buyers on G-Cloud account for 38% of the spend on the framework in FY 2023/24.
Of these ten, 90% sit within Central Government. NHS England is the exception, but it should be noted that NHS England is a Central Healthcare Organisation and sponsored by the Department for Health and Social Care meaning it is considered Central Government in Crown Commercial Service's G-Cloud reporting.
The table below shows a more granular breakdown of the top ten G-Cloud 13 buyers in 2023/24. Follows this links in the table to visit each buyer's profile in Stotles and achieve a deeper understanding of the contracts and suppliers these buyers are spending on.
Buyer | Sector | Spend 2023/24 |
---|---|---|
Department for Work and Pensions | Central Government | £183,006,803 |
Home Office | Central Government | £167,595,940 |
HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) | Central Government | £151,145,102 |
Ministry of Justice | Central Government | £107,017,102 |
Defence Digital | Central Government | £74,044,142 |
NHS England | Health/Central Government | £57,522,790 |
Cabinet Office | Central Government | £52,571,477 |
Ministry of Defence | Central Government | £50,987,437 |
National Highways | Central Government | £38,052,783 |
Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs | Central Government | £34,083,310 |
Despite Central Government being the predominant buying sector on G-Cloud, across G-Cloud and DOS the percentage of spend by Central Government has been reducing year-on-year since 2020 as buyers across other areas of the public sector utilise the frameworks more.
This could, in part, be due to the shift towards a need for digital resilience in areas like health, local government and education following the pandemic.
Central Government spend as a percentage of G-Cloud and DOS combined spend
Dive into buyer profiles to understand where there spending priorities are. What are they procuring? What open opportunities do they have? Who do they work with? What might they spend on next?
Spend across the wider public sector
While Central Government holds most of the public sector buying power on G-Cloud 13, it is well used by the wider public sector.
The top 50 buyers who sit across the wider public sector account for 9% of total G-Cloud13 spend in 2023/24.
Of the top 50 G-Cloud buyers beyond Central Government which were analysed Health accounted for 49% of the spend, with suppliers like Barts Health NHS Trust and Northern Health and Social Care Trust topping the chart for total spend in 2023/24.
The table below shows a more granular breakdown of the top 50 G-Cloud 13 buyers in the wider public sector in 2023/24. Follows this links in the table to visit each buyer's profile in Stotles and achieve a deeper understanding of the contracts and suppliers these buyers are spending on.
Procurement by lot
G-Cloud is split into four lots for the procurement of different cloud-based products and services.
- Cloud Hosting (Infrastructure as a Service, IaaS, and Platform as a Service, PaaS): This lot includes services related to cloud-based infrastructure solutions for processing and storing data, platforms for building, deploying, and managing applications, and environments that allow customers to develop, test, and run applications.
- Cloud Software (Software as a Service, SaaS): This lot features applications or software that are hosted in the cloud and can be accessed and used by customers over the internet. These solutions often include email, collaboration tools, customer relationship management (CRM) software, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.
- Cloud Support: It encompasses support services to help customers set up and maintain their cloud software or hosting. This includes migration services, deployment, and ongoing support.
- End-To-End Cloud Services: Lot 4 provides end-to-end cloud services. This is for larger scale transition projects covering planning, setup, migration, security services, and ongoing support provided by one supplier. Lot 4 does not allow direct award and is limited to a small group of suppliers (e.g. 40 on G-Cloud 13).
Lot 4 works as a seperate framework within G-Cloud, and is only open to a highly limited group of enterprise-level suppliers.
Of Lots 1-3, Lot 3 (Cloud Support) is used significantly more than any other lot with 60% of spend attributed to Lot 3 in 2023/24.
Biggest suppliers and contracts
Top G-Cloud suppliers 2023/24
The top ten suppliers for this year account for 23% of the total G-Cloud spend for 2023/24.
AWS alone accounts for almost 10% of the total spend for 2023/24. While it might be disheartening for smaller suppliers that one supplier can dominate a framework in this way, it is important to remember that AWS does not only provide its own cloud hosting services to the public sector and, like Microsoft, is involved in other suppliers' contracts by integrating systems or providing data storage.
The G-Cloud top ten is also dominated by consultancies. Consultancies are the types of suppliers who can list on Lot 4 to provide 'End-To-End Cloud Services', where some of the biggest contracts sit and can explain these suppliers' dominance across G-Cloud spend. As mentioned above, Lot 4 operates as its own mini-framework within G-Cloud and is limited to a small group of suppliers.
Softcat (the fifth most successful supplier on G-Cloud) is a Value Added Reseller (VAR) which resells other suppliers' products on their behalf. Use Stotles to look at where Softcat has relationships across the public sector, and the types of contracts they win - could they be a potential partner? If you're still unsure about whether G-Cloud is the framework for you, or whether you'll achieve return-on-investment for listing, tapping into a partner network could be the best way for you to benefit from G-Cloud as a route-to-market.
Top G-Cloud 13 contracts
Like G-Cloud more widely, Central Government is the dominant buyer across these contracts, evidencing where not only the most, but where the most lucrative opportunities are for suppliers.
The contracts themselves, however, are very varied in terms of what is being procured at a high-value through G-Cloud. The contracts cover software and systems, services and delivery, hosting and IT infrastructure, and reselling (in the instance of Computacenter).
As we established in the last section of this report, large enterprise suppliers tend to dominate G-Cloud (particularly those which are listed on lot 4) and the top ten biggest contracts procured on G-Cloud 13 reflects this.
However, according to Stotles data, the biggest contracts procured on Lots 1-3 were not always awarded to the biggest suppliers.
While the top ten largest contracts by value were almost exclusively awarded to large enterprise suppliers, only one contract on the list was awarded to one of the top ten biggest suppliers (the largest contract going to AWS).
Yet, the businesses which have secured the biggest contracts are no strangers to winning major public sector contracts, despite missing out on the top ten suppliers ranking:
- PA Consulting: 4th most successful G-Cloud supplier of all time with £356,314,667 spend on the platform, and ranking 13th in 2023/24
- Mastek: 13th most successful G-Cloud supplier of all time with £179,503,413 of spend on the platform, and ranking 18th for 2023/24
- Palantir: 15th most successful supplier in 2023/24
Title | Value | Award date | Buyer name | Buyer type | Suppliers | SME? |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
AWS VMware and EC2 | £21,000,000 | 06.03.2023 | Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) | Central Government | AWS | No |
Borders & Trade - Live Services Partner | £21,000,000 | 03.10.2023 | HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) | Central Government | MASTEK | No |
Recruiting IT System 2 | £12,509,576 | 09.02.2024 | Ministry of Defence | Central Government | Pegasystems | No |
Contract Extension of the Data Platform Services | £11,500,000 | 03.01.2023 | NHS England | Health | Palantir | No |
Provision of Mobile Policing Software | £11,427,040 | 20.12.2023 | Scottish Police Authority | Blue Light | Motorola | No |
National Institute of Health Research Information System Provider | £11,348,150 | 26.09.2023 | Department of Health and Social Care | Health | PA Consulting | No |
VOA BST - MS Dynamics Best of Breed Partner - Year 3 Delivery Partner | £10,500,000 | 30.08.2023 | HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) | Central Government | Hitachi Solutions | No |
Google Reseller Framework | £10,000,000 | 03.10.2023 | Digital Health and Care Wales | Health | Computacentre | No |
Defence Data and Analytics Platform | £8,625,000 | 11.01.2023 | Ministry of Defence | Central Government | Cognizant | No |
Transforming the Council Using AI Technology | £7,000,000 | 16.02.2024 | Derby City Council | Local Government | ICS AI | No |
🔦Contract Spotlight: Palantir
Palantir's £11.5m contract, which ranks 5th on the table below, is an interesting case study of how G-Cloud can be leveraged to secure high-value contracts, quickly for suppliers. The 'Contract Extension of the Data Platform Services' covered an extension of the use of Palantir's Foundry data storage platform which has been used by the NHS since the COVID-19 pandemic while the new NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP), designed to overcome a structural flaw in the NHS’s management of data, was being procured in 2023.
When the award was published, the extension of this contract was described by NHS England as less 'impractical' and more 'economic' than procuring and onboarding a new system during the FDP procurement period. As a result of G-Cloud's direct award permissions, streamlined procurement, and pre-approval, NHS England was able to move efficiently while Palantir were able to secure a major contract which embeds them further within the public sector.
Palantir, which is leading a consortium including Accenture, PWC, Carnall Farrar and NEC Software, were awarded up to £330 million for the NHS FDP contract in November last year. While the award itself has drawn criticism over Palantir's background in US spy-ware and the lack of transparency about the way the platform will process NHS patient data, the ongoing relationship between the NHS and Palantir and the ease with which the NHS is able to efficiently procure from them goes some way to explain the award and to highlight the value of frameworks like G-Cloud for sustaining ongoing commercial relationships with the public sector.
SMEs on G-Cloud 13
There are around 5000 suppliers on each iteration of G-Cloud, with around 4500 of these being SMEs. But, how much was actually spent on G-Cloud 13 with the smaller businesses who make up 90% of suppliers?
of suppliers on G-Cloud 13 are SMEs
of suppliers on G-Cloud 13 are large enterprises
So far, on G-Cloud 13, £2.21bn (56%) has been spent with large suppliers and £1.65bn (42%) has been spent with SME suppliers (with 2% or £7.5m of spend going to unclassified suppliers).
This means that just 10% of suppliers are winning 56% of G-Cloud 13 contracts.
However, while this might seem like G-Cloud is a lost-cause for SMEs, the ratio of spend between SMEs and large enterprises is much better than outside of the framework.
In 2015, the Government set the target that 33%, or one third, of public sector spending would be with SMEs. Dun & Bradstreet reported that in FY 2021/22, was only 26.5% of procurement expenditure was with SMEs (which was 0.4% than the year before).
Spend with SMEs dramatically exceeds the target set by government, and any attempts made to include SMEs across procurement more widely, meaning G-Cloud could be a lucrative route-to-market for SMEs looking to have an impact across the public sector.
Wondering which other frameworks could be your successful route-to-market? Get on the waitlist for Stotles' framework intelligence to see call-off contracts, which suppliers are using frameworks, and which frameworks are favoured by your ideal buyers.