Government has signed a memorandum of understanding, allowing public bodies to access technology from with digital collaboration supplier Huddle at a discount.
The company has worked with the Crown Commercial Service (CCS) after concluding that use of the technology by public sector employees is set grow in coming years.
Huddle offers cloud-based workspaces to allow the sharing of files, project management and collaboration on content, projects and programmes.
Mike Hayward, EMEA head of public sector at Huddle “The MoU with CCS provides any public sector organisation the chance to join our enterprise licence agreement, which provides a significantly lower price point per user than is currently available to any of our customers globally under the previous pricing models.
“By working with CCS, we have been able to provide our public sector customers with the most cost effective licensing options that we have available today within Huddle.”
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Huddle’s public sector-specific pricing scheme will be available to all public sector bodies purchasing through G-Cloud on the Digital Marketplace.
Prior to signing the deal, CCS spoke to several existing Huddle customers to understand their usage patterns stretching back over a number of years to understand usage patterns and what problems Huddle was helping to solve.
Hayward said: “Once the CCS had been through this review process, they were happy that it is highly likely that SaaS and collaborative technologies will play an ever greater role in the public sector agenda – in no small part due to multi agency working initiatives and the austerity drive that is forcing organisations to adopt new and more agile ways of working, which require new technologies to support them.”
Sarah Hurrell, commercial director for technology at CCS, said: “The preferential pricing scheme we have introduced with Huddle will improve the way technology is bought across government and the public sector, and will contribute to increased savings to the public purse”.
CCS is planning to help to drive awareness of the technology through their regular licensing webinars, Huddle said.