Suppliers invited to apply for latest iteration of flagship procurement vehicle – which may the last before it is restructured into more specialised deals

Credit: Pxfuel

Bidding for a place on the G-Cloud 12 framework has opened, with the successful suppliers forecast to receive up to £2bn in business.

As with the most recent previous versions of the procurement vehicle, G-Cloud 12 is split into three lots: cloud hosting; cloud software; and cloud support.

The first of these will feature suppliers tasked with delivering platform- and infrastructure-as-a-service offerings, as well as a range of related cybersecurity and storage services. 

The second lot, meanwhile, is primarily dedicated to software-as-a-service products, including finance, analytics, and customer relationship management tools.

Both of these lots come with an estimated value of £350m over the contract’s one-year lifespan. 

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The final lot covers an array of support services, including consultancy, testing, migration, training, and ongoing maintenance.

This lot comes with a projected worth of £1.25bn, taking the overall value of the framework to £1.95bn.

G-Cloud 11 featured a total of just under 4,200 suppliers collectively offering more than 31,000 services. The prior version of the framework offered public-sector buyers to chance to procure 25,000 services from 3,500 firms.

Bids for a place on the incoming deal are open until 22 April and existing G-Cloud providers still need to apply. The contract is due to come into effect on 2 July – the day after G-Cloud 11 expires.

Up to the end of 2018 – which represents the most recently available data – more than £4bn had been spent via the first 10 versions of G-Cloud. About four-fifths of this figure can be attributed to central government, with the rest being spent by the wider public sector.

SMEs have won 71% of contracts by volume, and 45% by value – equating to a total of about £1.8bn.

G-Cloud 12 looks set to be the last version of the framework in its present structure. Crown Commercial Service has previously unveiled plans to a smaller deal dedicated purely to various forms of cloud hosting, as well as another offshoot covering artificial intelligence, machine learning, and automation.