The government’s latest digital procurement framework has attracted 60% more suppliers than the previous iteration of the platform.
The government’s digital procurement platform now has more than 2,000 suppliers – Photo credit: Fotolia
Digital Outcomes and Specialists 2, which went live on Friday, is a marketplace for public sector organisations to buy digital services from a range of suppliers.
Figures released by the Digital Marketplace team show that there are 2,018 suppliers on the new framework – 60% more than were listed previously. Of these, 94% are micro, small or medium-sized businesses.
The government has committed to ensuring that for every £3 spent on procurement, £1 is spent with SMEs, as part of efforts to increase innovation in the public sector and stimulate the market among smaller suppliers.
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There are four categories on the framework, with some suppliers being listed in more than one category. There are 1,586 suppliers in digital outcomes; 1,774 in digital specialists; 85 in user research labs; and 181 in user research participants.
This takes the total number of suppliers on the Digital Marketplace – which also includes the cloud procurement platform G-Cloud – to 3,974, of which 93% are SMEs.
According to the data, most of the suppliers remain in England, focused in London and the south east, but the Digital Marketplace team said the proportion of suppliers in each region has stayed the same, or slightly increased.
The map shows where suppliers on Digital Outcomes and Specialists 2 are based. The number of suppliers in each region has stayed the same or slightly increased.
The old framework is now no longer functional, and the Digital Marketplace team said that it would be surveying all suppliers who were on the first framework but did not apply to the second to find out why they chose not to re-apply.
This will be used to iterate and improve future designs of the framework, the team said.
The first iteration of the framework was originally intended to close on 2 December, but was last year extended to allow users to continue to buy services until the second iteration went live.
