The government’s Digital Marketplace team has shared a new timetable to give suppliers time to prepare their applications for G-Cloud 8 (G8).

The current expected date from which applications will be welcomed was named as 17 May, although suppliers will be able to create a Digital Marketplace account  from now.

A blog post on the Digital Marketplace said: “User feedback told us that the G-Cloud 7 (G7) application process was simpler and easier than the one we used for G-Cloud 6 (G6). With this in mind, the way suppliers apply to G8 will be the same as for G7.”

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However, it said that G8 legal documents would be “shorter and clearer” than the G7 ones despite the fact that “we haven’t had the resource to simplify the language”.

In addition, the blog said that the Specialist Cloud Services (SCS) category would now be more clearly defined – although did not reveal more details.

In a separate post, the Digital Marketplace team said that was considering scrapping the current four G-Cloud categories - Infrastructure as a Service, Platforms as a Service,  Software as a Service and Specialist Cloud Services.

It is holding discussions with suppliers and buyers to work out whether user needs have changed and whether to institute changes for the G-Cloud 9 process.

Among other questions, it will also seek to find out whether the framework can help simplify the transition from lengthy and expensive ICT contracts to cloud services, and how an end-to-end purchase to payment transaction process could work.