The online procurement platform for digital products and services, CloudStore, remains live despite plans to deactivate it at the end of September.

CloudStore, from the Government Digital Service (GDS), continues to run in parallel with its future replacement Digital Marketplace. But a statement from GDS in September said: “At the end of the month, Digital Marketplace will be the place to buy G-Cloud services. This means that we will be switching off CloudStore.”

Digital Marketplace aims to be ‘the single place for all of Government to buy what it needs to design, build and support its digital services’ via the G-Cloud framework. In the new year it will also become the home for the Digital Services Framework, for the public sector procurement of software developers. 

Director of G-Cloud and the Digital Commercial Programme, Tony Singleton, writes on the Digital Marketplace blog that the next iteration of the G-Cloud and Digital Services frameworks will be launched by the end of October. 

“We released the alpha in May and have been incorporating regular feedback from buyers and suppliers who have come along to the GDS user research lab”, he writes in the article. “By far, most comments from buyers are about how much easier it is to find the service they are looking for”.

On the same blog yesterday, GDS Service Manager Ivanka Majic appealed to suppliers to submit their G-Cloud success stories. A series of free events aimed at public sector buyers and suppliers to clarify how the G-Cloud framework can improve buying and delivering IT services has been taking place across the country.

The sixth iteration of the G-Cloud framework is planned to open to submissions this month.