G-Cloud 9 deadline reached with almost 3,000 completed applications

Data reveals last minute flurry of activity, as more than 1,500 completed in final two days

The application deadline for G-Cloud 9 closed on Wednesday – Photo credit: Flickr, Chris Potter, CC BY 2.0

The application window for suppliers wanting to join the latest iteration of the government’s cloud procurement platform has closed, with figures revealing there were 2,856 completed applications.

The data on G-Cloud 9 applications, published on the government’s performance platform, show that 66.9% of the suppliers in the system completed their applications by the 11 April deadline.

Of the total 4,268 applications started, 10% had made a declaration when the deadline arrived, with 23% not reaching this stage.


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The data shows a large jump in activity from 9 April, when there was just 1,179 completed applications and the split between completed applications, those who had made a declaration and those who had just started it off, was more even. The proportions in each of these categories, respectively, were 29.2%, 33.5% and 36.1%.

This is compared with a relatively small number of completed applications in the early stages of the window, which opened on 7 March.

Data for the early days show that, in the first week – to 14 March – that 1,405 suppliers started applications, 689 had made declarations, while just 99 had completed the process.

These figures rose to 1,660, 953 and 186, respectively, by the following week, but it was not until 4 April that the number of completed applications rose above 500.

The dashboard also gives a breakdown of the services added to G-Cloud by the suppliers. There were 19,900 added by the deadline of 5pm on 11 April, more than half of which were in cloud support, with 10,300 services.

There were also 6,734 cloud software services, and 2,909 cloud hosting listed.

In a blogpost about the dashboard, the Digital Marketplace team said that there was “a lot to learn from how suppliers apply to a framework”.

This includes the ability to monitor the level of supplier interest during the course of the application process and tracking the conversion rate from starting an application to completing it.

The team said it has access to an internal dashboard with high-level statistics, and that it used these to advise suppliers that have started but not completed an application that the deadline is looming.

However, the team added that while the application window is open, suppliers are anonymous from the data that it sees.

“We focus on overall statistics and look for trends,” the post said. “For example, many G-Cloud suppliers move their services from draft to complete in the final few days of the application window. It’s always exciting to watch the number of complete applications shoot up towards the end.”

The last iteration of the procurement framework, G-Cloud 8, listed 2,726 suppliers when it went live on 1 August 2016, up from 1,616 listed on G-Cloud 7 when it launched in November 2015.

The ninth iteration of the framework has seen a number of changes that aim to make it easier to use, including more categories for services, a new lot structure and giving suppliers the ability to edit information about their services online.

Services from successful applicants are due to be available on 22 May 2017.

Rebecca.Hill

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