This post is a response to the article published on PublicTechnology.net – please see this link..
http://www.publictechnology.net/sector/central-gov/uk-tech-firm-why-we-declined-bid-g-cloud-work#comment-8197
The above response is very typical of “sour grapes” and protectionism from a company unable to openly compete in a commodity market. Contract terms, open pricing, definitions are all designed to give the same – identical in fact (to the greatest extent possible) to all providers, large and small. Even in this first version of G-Cloud they are adequate, hence there are plenty of companies (255) including tens of private Cloud providers, that have bid. They believe that the definitions are flexible enough to accommodate their services.
Having read the above letter in detail, I can say that it shows why G-Cloud is a great idea. It helps to weed out “special” companies that mistakenly believe that what they sell is unique. It is not. It never is in a commodity market. Even if it is a private cloud, special software or whatever, it is exactly the same as the next persons with comparable SLA. There is a service dimension, and of course price…
It is time to end “complicated IT” where it is not appropriate and end public sector rip-off. The debate between private / public clouds or pointless scare mongering will not stop or even slow this process down – there are already plenty of case studies showing savings of 80% on traditional providers (each one of who was apparently delivering cost reductions already).
Further, the observations on public Cloud are incorrect – simply put public cloud or larger providers, will give a true SLA much higher that “traditional hosting” companies have done in the past… Amazon, for example, offers 99.999% or 11 “9s” on storage. This is a true SLA (meaning it is not financial – their network really delivers that). in any case, the true uptime will depend on the WAN / Internet link, which is the weakest point, hence it worth considering SLA consistency across IT architecture.
On the longer term pricing – if you believe that you have a fantastic deal, great service and technology – you don’t need long term contracts to give you clients a discount – give it anyway – surely they will come back to you… If you wish to lock them into the contract in return for a “discount”, then your offer is not that good to start with. This is simple economics – the more competitive the market, then better the price and value. Lock-ins are designed to reduce competition – so there is your answer.
There are too many biased and incorrect points to mention in the response. it is clear that the author is mostly afraid of the flexibility and power G-Cloud provides to its clients, and wishes, at all costs, to avoid disclosing “special” prices to new clients, but most importantly to their existing ones. Well, the good news, like other Cloud, G-Cloud does not need individual companies support – it is the future, and will happen anyway…
