Happy 10th Birthday to the UK G-Cloud programme!
The team at Kahootz would like to wish a very Happy 10th Birthday to the G-Cloud and the pioneers that conceived it. Reaching such a key milestone, we thought it would be worthwhile summarising our experiences and successes to date.
G-Cloud – an idea ahead of its time
In March 2012, the UK Government introduced its G-Cloud procurement framework, a world-leading initiative to simplify the purchase of commodity cloud services. Strategically, it empowered thousands of SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) to promote and sell new and innovative cloud services and therefore compete with the oligopoly of large IT firms that ‘owned’ the majority of government contracts.
Fortunately for Kahootz, as an SME with a proven track record for providing cloud collaboration software to the UK public sector, we were ideally placed to leverage the promised increased access to buyers from across some 30,000 public sector bodies.
Designed to stimulate competition through a more transparent and open marketplace, certain vendors were naturally nervous about publishing their price lists to buyers and competitors alike. Kahootz decided that price transparency was good as long as everyone else played by the rules. In addition to publishing the prices of our G-Cloud services, we also made a free trial of Kahootz available so that prospective buyers could de-risk their procurement exercise by testing that our cloud collaboration service met with their requirements.
Has Kahootz benefitted from the G-Cloud?
The G-Cloud has been very beneficial for Kahootz. Right from the beginning, we started receiving enquiries, and things only improved when we became one of the first companies to gain pan-government accreditation for information security in 2013.
As with G-Cloud supplier pricing, all G-Cloud sales are publicly available. This online dashboard (and the graph it generated below) clearly shows how G-Cloud sales have increased year on year for INOVEM LIMITED (the company behind Kahootz).
Growth in annual G-Cloud Sales for INOVEM Ltd (trading as Kahootz)
Through the G-Cloud programme, we have gained many new loyal and happy clients, much of whom have since increased their usage of our secure cloud collaboration service as their staff and stakeholders innovate and adopt new, smarter, ways of working.
Cloud services benefit from being easily scaled up and down. The call-off nature of the G-Cloud procurement framework has allowed us to support collaborations from a small six-month project for ten users to significant national communications infrastructures such as the FutureNHS collaboration platform (powered by Kahootz). Used as the primary online collaboration tool to support teamwork and knowledge sharing across health and social care, this platform has now grown to serve a quarter of a million users!
By focussing on making it easier for organisations to work with external stakeholders and partner agencies, Kahootz has become the collaboration platform of choice for the Department of Health and Social Care, the UK Ministry of Defence, the Cabinet Office, the Ministry of Justice and many others.
Competing on the G-Cloud
There are currently over 5,200 suppliers on the G-Cloud, and a quick search for “collaboration software” via the online Digital Marketplace returns 2,755 results. Given that figure, we believe that our sales to date show that Kahootz outperforms most of our competitors. Of course, US giants like Microsoft, Google, and Box have far superior revenues and resources. Fortunately, however, Kahootz has been able to win business against them through our reputation for delivering secure and flexible collaboration service that provides value for money, ease of use, and great support.
As a source of business intelligence, we find the UK Government’s Digital Future Sales dashboard useful when evaluating the public sector sales of our closest competitors, as a comparison. We are aware, with increased home-working, that many departments accelerated a transition to Microsoft’s cloud services during the pandemic. Still, fortunately for us, products like Microsoft Teams don’t compete with Kahootz.
It seems that many other SMEs are also successfully using the G-Cloud procurement framework to compete against larger IT providers. A recent review of G-Cloud spend data by Advice Cloud, shows that G-Cloud sales have grown year-on-year and that spend with SMEs is now around 37%, exceeding the Government’s target of 33% (£1 in every £3).
Many happy returns, with more to come!
With the G-Cloud just about to enter its thirteenth framework iteration, we still believe the G-Cloud offers the simplest, most cost-effective and most transparent method for public sector organisations to procure Cloud Services such as Kahootz.
Although the future is unknown, we are grateful to the pioneers who conceived and fought for a shift in the status quo in public sector IT procurement. It has been fun seeing how our public sector clients are empowered to innovate new ways of working through the introduction of our Kahootz cloud collaboration software.
Happy 10th Birthday, G-Clouders! We look forward to the next ten years.
